From: Mike Ayers (mike.ayers@tumbleweed.com)
Date: Tue Apr 20 2004 - 22:01:22 EDT
> From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]On
> Behalf Of John Jenkins
> Sent: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 6:40 PM
> > The tab "character" is used in the file. Arguably, this
> "character"
> > should
> > never appear in a plain text file, rather it should be
> converted to an
> > appropriate number of U+0020 characters by the application on save.
> > Of course, this would make the file even bigger.
> >
>
> Tab-separated data files are quite common. (Indeed, I tend to get
> annoyed with the main UCD file because it's
> semicolon-separated.) I'm
> not sure why you'd want a tab never to appear in a plain-text file.
Different systems (and different applications, too) have different
interpretations of where tab boundaries occur. The most common
interpretations are modulo-8 and modulo-5, but I've seen modulo-4 as well.
Viewing tabs on a system with a different interpretation of tab widths can
be painful, which is why James proposed they not be used (also note his
"arguably"). I code with modulo-3 tabs, and must convert to and from
pure-space text to archive my code, which comes with its own set of
problems.
/|/|ike
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