>Of course. One of the biggest problems facing any of us who wishes to live in
a world of computing diversity is the failure of file system designers to
develop a rational method for tagging files, and indeed, for developing standard
interchange formats. That's what we're trying to do here.
..
>What about file type and record format?...
>Actually I am attempting to achieve an agreement a precise definition of
Unicode plain text that allows the text to be already formatted, one that gives
us the same capability that we have always had with ASCII (and Latin-x etc) of
encoding and presenting information without *requiring* the use of any higher
intelligence beyond what is needed to interpret Space, LS, PS, HT, and FF
characters...
I find myself in agreement with Ken W's comments a few messages back. I'm also
inclined to say that you are wanting to define (in effect) a MIME type, and that
part of the confusion / disagreement that has arisen in this thread comes about
by calling this type "plain text".
You want a file that is tagged with null markup to be interpreted in a specific
way (as a text document as opposed, e.g. to a database) and with specific layout
formatting. As was pointed out in an earlier message, and as we are all familiar
with, sometime files that contain only text characters and no tagging are used
for purposes other than this, such as the CSV database. Also, there are times
when I've had such text files in which I intend all of the text that exists
between instances of { BOF, EOF, NLF } to appear on a single line, regardless of
length (e.g. in source code), and other times when I expect it to wrap to
whatever width is appropriate for the window in which it is viewed.
All of these are legitimate things to want to be able to do with a file in this
format that we have always known as "plain text". Neither the intended meaning
of the content, nor the intended appearance have ever been part of the
definition of plain text. Thus, I think you should expect some objection to any
suggestion that "plain text" should refer to a file that is intended to be
interpreted in a specific way, i.e. as a text document with specific layout
formatting. Plain text can be neither more nor less than what is has always
been. As we apply plain text to the Unicode context, Ken's comments were on the
mark.
That is not to say that it isn't reasonable, or desireable, to specify a file
format to be used for text documents with specific layout formatting such that
it will always appear as the author intended, and such that no markup is used
beyond a standard interpretation of the characters (separating this file format
from others such as PDF). We'd all benefit from it, if an agreement can be made.
I just think that we may need to call it something else. And this is what Frank
has acknowledged, though he may not have done so consciously:
>the mail system should allow me to mark it as "preformatted plain text"
We're not just talking about plain text here, we're talking about a specific
kind of plain text.
Peter
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT