From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon Nov 10 2003 - 06:09:10 EST
From: <jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com>
> I think the proposals either to have the six "hexalphadigits" or the
sixteen
> "hexdigits" or the 256 "bytedigits" are doomed to have about as much usage
> as the equally well-intentioned Unicode LS and PS.
The bad thing about the proposed 6 HEX digits, is that it assumes that the
other 10 digits in ASCII are meant to be represented with a unique figure
width. I can find various fonts in which this is not true, but they are
indeed, conforming to Unicode meaning of digits.
What should such a font fo to support figure-width digits along with its
variable-width digits, so that this font would support the new hex-digits?
For me the consideration in the HEX digits proposal is only a problem of
style for the presentation of numbers in aligned tables. Documents and
programs that need a figure spacing for these tables can/should choose
another monospaced font in a rich layout.
Unicode or the plain-text format is not expected to support table layouts,
or constrained line-lengths, because it's intended to keep a separation
between text, and most of its semantic structure, layout and appearance
that will best fit in external stylesheets or out-of-band markup.
You can print or present plain-text RFCs with a proportionnal font, but
you'll be prepared to the fact that some ASCII arts won't display correctly.
This is not a problem of RFCs, but a problem with their expected rendering
with monospaced fonts.
The best to do is then to use the other formats in which RFCs are also
available, like HTML which support enough markup to mix ASCII arts with a
monospace font, and the rest of the text with a default, possibly
proportional, font.
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