<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Except for the narrow case of popular
pictographs (read emoji) there's been a clear consensus that
including images in a message or document is best realized with
out-of-band information (or rich text formats that are not plain
text, whether or not they have a plain-text source code format).</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Anything short of a multi-vendor effort
is unlikely to change that status quo, so all these schemes
represent curiosities at best (and discussing them mainly has
entertainment value, if that).</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
A./<br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/6/2024 2:27 PM, William_J_G
Overington via Unicode wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:73075d0f.c526.18eb54f2c10.Webtop.117@btinternet.com">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">Jim DeLaHunt wrote as follows.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">> Why not take all that
energy, and put it towards encouraging application developers
to provide ways to mix pictures as pictures into the text
stream?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">In recent years there have been a
few suggestions (by others, not me) in documents in the
Unicode Technical Committee Document Register for such
systems. If I remember correctly, at least one involved using
tag characters. As far as I am aware, none have gone forward.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">Reading your post I remembered
that over twenty years ago I put forward in this mailing list
a suggestion for what I called a .uof file. Trying to find it,
as yet unsuccessfully, I found that .uof is now used as a
suffix in an entirely different system, an office software
system, so if my idea were to become implemented a different
file extension would be needed.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">If I remember correctly, my .uof
file suggestion was such that if the plain text file that it
accompanied had n uses of the character</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">U+FFFC OBJECT REPLACEMENT
CHARACTER</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">then the .uof file would have n
lines of text, each line of text containing the name of a
graphics file, either just a file name for a local file or a
URL (Uniform Resource Locator) for a file obtainable from the
web, listed in the order that the corresponding U+FFFC
character for the graphics file appeared in the plain text
file that the .uof file accompanied.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">Page 33 of </span><a
target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"
href="https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ch23.pdf"
moz-do-not-send="true"><span style="font-size:18px;">https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode15.0.0/ch23.pdf</span></a><span
style="font-size:18px;"> has some notes about U+FFFC.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">In those days the Unicode
Technical Committe Document Register was not publicly
available. After it became publicly available to read I
remember that I found that my suggestion of a .uof file had
been discussed at a meeting of the Unicode Technical
Committee.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">So there are various ways to
include graphics in, or accompaying and linked to, plain text
file content that have been suggested.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">If there is a will by the Unicode
Technical Committee to go forward and have such a capability
agreed and specified in a Unicode Technical Specification then
there are various ideas for achieveing a result that have
already been put forward, and other ideas maight well be
devised too.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">As for the possibility of me
encouraging application developers to develop systems, well, I
am retired and I could not credibly approach them suggesting
they spend time and effort implementing my ideas unless I were
in a position to pay them to do it. Yet if Unicode Inc.
encoded the best system that can be devised, then maybe
application developers would choose to take up that system and
implement it, and progress would be achieved.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">> Why is it so terribly
important to use the mechanism of text to deliver pictures in
text, instead of using a application-based mechanism of mixed
text and pictures?</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">As far as I am aware, it is a
matter of interoperability amongst various platforms and the
fact that emoji are used inline with text, at various places
within the text, not all together in the style of a diagram
accompanying the text.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">William Overington</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size:18px;">Saturday 6 April 2024</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
</body>
</html>