On 6 Jul 99, at 10:25, John Cowan wrote:
> As for HT and FF, nobody uses them incompatibly, and
> introducing new characters for them is supererogation at best.
Actually the question of HT and FF is the most bothersome one, for
me. There are (at least) two problems:
HT and FF both depend in some sense on the user's environment, e.g.
page length (paper size if the "rendering engine" is a printer or
hardcopy terminal), and tab stop settings.
HT has ambiguous semantics when the HT occurs when the cursor is
already at a tab stop. If the cursor got to a tab stop because of an
HT, then there is no argument - another HT moves to the next tab
stop. But if the cursor got there because of ordinary, implicit
movement, then some systems ignore an HT (i.e. stay in the same
place), while others move on to the next stop. Granted, this is
mainly a problem of input methods rather than data storage or
interchange, but I don't think it's quite fair to say that no one
uses HT incompatibly.
Tony H.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT