> The only thing that is clear about "plain text" is that it is not well
> defined at all.
>
Actually, it tends to be well-defined for each platform. And then the
interchange methods among platforms tend to converge on a few simple
conventions: ASCII (or the appropriate ISO character set, or now UTF-8 or
other form of Unicode), as opposed to EBCDIC (or Baudot, or Sixbit); CRLFs
separating lines, and paragraphs separated by blank lines. Somewhat less
well defined, but nevertheless in common use, are bare Carriage Return or
Backspace for overstriking, Formfeed for "new page", and Tab for tabbing
(with several different conventions about tabstops).
Lines are terminated at somewhere between 72 and 80 characters by
convention, because that's how wide terminal screens are, and before them
the Teletype carriage, and before that the most common kind of punchcard.
Or for that matter, typewriters and sheets of paper (A4 or US, take your
pick :-)
To this day, we follow these conventions in newsgroups and email, although
now it might be more a matter of "netiquette" than necessity (as in the
BITNET days, when e-mail was, quite literally, 80-column card images).
These simple conventions let us format our text exactly the way we want to.
We can indent or not, we can put line breaks where we want them, we can have
columns of numbers or other tabular presentations, mathematical expressions,
and idiosyncratic forms of emphasis. Many people want their text to stay
the way they wrote it. And many people also are not fond of receiving email
in every kind of bizarre format than any application developer can dream up
when it contains, in fact, nothing but words (but I stray).
> I think the Unix community should slowly get used to the idea of
> abandoning LFs in the middle of paragraphs in plain text documents and
> let the editor and display tool perform the reformatting at display
> time.
>
But what IS plain text? Maybe some people might like to have their email
reformatted, but I don't think they want their C or Fortran or PostScript
programs to receive the same treatment. Nor, for that matter poetry or any
other forms of text where line breaks, indentation, and blank lines serve a
purpose. As in, for example, the preceding paragraph.
No more plain-text bashing! No more "legacy" saying! Our focus should be
not on stamping out plain text, but on promoting international multilingual
communication through a universal character set that does not impose a
a particular modus vivendi upon its users.
- Frank
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:47 EDT