Re: Re[3]: Hardwarily formating colour and size of font (3 new symbols)

From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Oct 02 2007 - 11:52:03 CST

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    On 10/1/07, Dmitry Turin <unicode20@narod.ru> wrote:
    > James,
    >
    > JK> idea, in this case, is that color should be an aspect of plain text.
    > My ideas about hardwarily formating has the same root.
    >
    > JK> Until proven otherwise, color is not an aspect of plain text.
    > My arguments:
    > (1) people emphasize part of text by
    > (*) capitalizing
    > (*) spacing between letters inside words
    > (*) marks "_" (or "*") before and after phrase
    > (*) marks "_" between letters inside words
    > Thus we have, that emphasizing is aspect of plain text.

    Emphasizing _can be_ an aspect of plain text.

    > All known basis consist of: color, size, underlining, oblique.

    Uh, no. Not even close. Font change, position on the page or item,
    position of the item, presentation of the item (if the banker/landlord
    hands a single page to you alone and asks you to read it carefully and
    then sign it, that's a heck of a lot of emphasis.) Emphasis can be a
    lot of things, at a lot of different levels.

    I don't think plain text is as concrete a concept as a lot of
    Unicodians seem to think it is. It's an arbitrary level of text, that
    doesn't include italics and color purely by definition. I can easily
    imagine a world where italics and color were part of plain text. But
    that's not this world.

    To change the basic rules of plain text would be a huge thing. All
    markup languages depend on knowing what is plain text and what's
    solely their department, and interfering with that would be huge. To
    even begin to propose it, you need to be prepared to change everything
    and show why it would be better, not propose a few new marks and
    symbols.



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