Re: Tildes on vowels

From: Philipp Reichmuth (uzsv2k@uni-bonn.de)
Date: Tue Aug 13 2002 - 12:08:26 EDT


Hello, William,

This is sort of lengthy once more. Forgive me and put me in your score
files. :-)

>>1) The need for such rendering mechanisms in plain text interchange
>>has not been shown.

WO> Well, what are objective criteria for showing it?

Is there any application where it is *needed* to process plain text -
i.e. where widely accepted solutions, utilizing open standards and
completely non-hardware-dependent such as HTML or XML, currently
utilized by millions of end users and programmers alike and with -
comparatively - good software support, are insufficient? Especially,
insufficent by design?

I think there are a number of people here who would take the whole
dilemma a lot more seriously if they were shown that one *needs* to do
certain things in a *plain* text editor (such as Notepad), and,
moreover, that an XML file with a custom DTD will *not* do.

Note that asking Microsoft to have Notepad support courtyard codes is
a lot more work and a lot less likely to succeed than working with
custom XML files. Especially on older hardware, for obvious reasons
(if new software is needed, it will probably require newer hardware,
too)

WO> The said using of < to mean ENTER MARKUP BUBBLE means that using <
WO> to mean LESS-THAN SIGN means that an end user then has to use a
WO> special mechanism to display that standard character on a page.

Markup is a present real solution to real peoples' real problems.
Having software insert &lt; instead of U+003C when the user presses
the "<" key is trivial. Software has been doing this for years.

Having to work around a software vendor's decision to use U+XXXX from
the PUA to mean, say, "BOLD" when XXXX is in the PUA and I need to
process it for my *private* use, is not trivial. It puts everybody
right back into pre-Unicode times.

With glyphs in the PUA, the problem is less bad than with control
characters. Putting control characters in the private use PUA and
expecting others to adhere to them is dangerous and, to some extend,
disrespectful of other people's need of private characters in the PUA.
It might be a good idea to move your Courtyard Codes to the Corporate
Use PUA subarea, partly because in your suggestion that everybody else
should share the codes, you are beginning to act like a software
vendor, and partly because it saves other people hassle.

WO> even if their asking has been made .... er, taboo! :-)

I don't think this is a case of taboo. It's rather that people still
don't see where a plain text encoding could be *better*.

Especially given that no software whatsoever supports the codes, and
if it did, one would have to work with custom application software
(that knows that U+XXXX means "BOLD") and/or with special
Courtyard-Code-compatible fonts that know about Golden Ligatures, of
which there are none in existence today.

  Philipp



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