From: Dean Harding (dean.harding@dload.com.au)
Date: Tue Apr 14 2009 - 00:54:12 CDT
> escape sequences are messy, and one can't tell from a text file
> which convention is behind an escape sequence. hence, was it
> ISO-2022 or a different one?
Here's an idea. Write up your proposal, and use one of the many available
characters in the PUA of Unicode (there's 130,000-odd to choose from). If
your proposed scheme gains traction, you can come back here and ask that
your characters be encoded in Unicode.
In general, characters do not get encoded in Unicode unless they're already
in use. The SOCCER BALL symbol that you referenced before, if you look at
the proposal, already had a number of uses in the real world.
> yes, i did. what the heck html has to do in plain text files. there is
> no generally agreed on text format except of plain text. today, we
> could talk about OpenDocument. but would you store your system config
> in odt? would your store your programming scripts in odt? would you
> store your emails in odt? ...
Do you want bold and italics in your system configuration?
> why? text-processing systems already have buttons for entering those
> codes. only, at the moment they enter meta-data into their proprietary
> text-file formats...
My keyboard has no way for me to type the "ESC" character. Pressing the
"ESC" key does something totally different. My keyboard certainly doesn't
have a way for me to type totally new characters that haven't even been
encoded yet!
> read from above again and try to understand that ISO-2022 is not an
> example of what people want.
What "people" are you talking about? It's not what YOU want, granted, but
why generalize that to include ALL people?
> not for graphical text editors, for email and other messaging systems,
> for wikis, blogs and ... ah ... so many ... also, before they switch to
> html they rather support new uni-codes.
You mentioned above having a toolbar buttons for entering these new
characters which affects bold, italics, etc. What's wrong with having
toolbar buttons that output HTML instead? There's plenty of WYSIWYG HTML
editors for wikis, blogs, and so on. What's wrong with those?
You say you don't want to use HTML or some other higher-level markup
language, but you haven't really said why. You just assume that it's
"obvious" that HTML is not the right way to do these things. Why not? It's
worked pretty well so far.
Dean.
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