Many years ago, in the initial days of Unicode development, I discussed it
with a colleague at DEC. His response was that Unicode would become weighed
down with all sorts of junk getting added to it. Over twenty years later
Unicode's huge success comes from not having done that. It is not going to
start now.
- Tim Greenwood
On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 11:37 AM William_J_G Overington <
wjgo_10009_at_btinternet.com> wrote:
> > Blocks of boring plain text, no italics or effects any more complex than
> justification, simple notes written all in one font with no formatting to
> speak of etc.
>
>
> I am wondering if it is considered a good idea to define into Plane 14
> some formatting characters, so that plain text could in the future contain
> italics and so on.
>
>
> For example, written here with an asterisk included as I seem to remember
> that that is the convention so as to avoid a suggested new character being
> mistaken as an existing character, how about the following.
>
>
> *U+E1000 FORMAT NOT ITALICS
>
>
> *U+E1001 FORMAT ITALICS
>
>
> *U+E1002 FORMAT NOT BOLD
>
>
> *U+E1003 FORMAT BOLD
>
>
> Traditionally such a suggestion would be refuted as out of scope for plain
> text: use of markup would be suggested.
>
>
> Yet that was then, this is now: ideas of what can, or should, be encoded
> in plain text have changed with time and could usefully continue to change
> where that is of use to consumers.
>
>
> I have often wondered why use of markup is regarded as such a requirement
> when the capabilities of plain text could so easily be enhanced. Expanding
> the capabilities of plain text would increase interoperability.
>
>
> William Overington
>
>
> 26 March 2015
>
>
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> Unicode_at_unicode.org
> http://unicode.org/mailman/listinfo/unicode
>
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Received on Thu Mar 26 2015 - 16:08:46 CDT
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