Markus Kuhn scripsit:
> The only thing that is clear about "plain text" is that it is not well
> defined at all. There is certainly no ISO standard that gives you any
> indication of what "plain text" is.
What a pity. Perhaps there should be one (no :-)).
> The Unix community feels somewhat
> confident about the notion of plain text, just because they have editors
> such as ed, vi, emacs, etc. that agree on a common text format that is
> so simple that it has become customary to refer to it as plaintext.
The notion of plain text long predates Unix: it was exactly the same,
for example, on the PDP-8, which is where I first learned computing.
(Terminator was CR/LF, and the character code was 7-bit-ASCII-with-8th-bit-
set, for uniformity with Model 33 Teletypes).
> I think the Unix community should slowly get used to the idea of
> abandoning LFs in the middle of paragraphs in plain text documents and
> let the editor and display tool perform the reformatting at display
> time.
AFAIK, the "reformatting web browsers" you refer to do not reformat
plain text at all, which means that infinite-line-length alleged
plain text can be read only with difficulty and much scrolling, and
printing is impossible.
--
John Cowan cowan@ccil.org
I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin
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