> It cannot be said that the C0 and C1 control characters are the
> greatest achievement of these ``30+ years etc.''
>
Actually they served us all rather well considering how few of them
there are and how long they lasted (and continue to last). We've
covered this ground before... But (to cite only one example) do you
know how many terminals and terminal emulators are "still" in use?
I would venture to say the number has not declined significantly since
the 1980s. It might well have increased. It's just that they are no
longer the *only* form of online access, and they work well, so we
ignore them.
> FdC> In fact, plain text is the only immutable format in computing.
>
> Agreed. And the only reason it is not portable is the poor
> standardisation of the C0 and C1 control characters.
>
The CR/LF/CRLF confusion is annoying of course, but we've lived with
it all these years, and continue to live with it. But you're talking
about file formats. The use of control characters in data communications
is fairly well standardized, pretty much along the lines of a Teletype:
CR moves the print head to the left margin, LF moves it down one line,
and ESC introduces a device-dependent escape or control sequence, etc.
> FdC> Finally, please remember that Unicode is a plain-text standard.
> FdC> The control characters are there for a reason: you need them in
> FdC> plain text.
>
> You need a paragraph separator and possibly a line break (and perhaps
> a page break). Unicode defines well-standardised codepoints for
> those. If you use other control characters, such as SO/SI for
> controlling boldface or italics, or BS (or CR) for overstriking, or
> terminal control sequences, it ain't plain text no more.
>
But Unicode and the terminal acess model are not mutually exclusive.
There can be (and are) Unicode-based terminal emulators, capable of
handling (e.g.) UTF-8 on the wire. And when you have terminal
communications, you have control characters. (When you emulate, say,
a VT320, you have LOTS of control characters :-)
- Frank
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:47 EDT