| > So we could have a character
| >
| > COLUMN SEPARATOR
| >
| > (CSEP) to go with LINE SEPARATOR (LSEP) and PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR (PSEP).
|
| This isn't going to happen. Column alignment in tables is clearly a
| higher-level document formatting issue -- not a problem to be solved
| by attributing complex layout attributes to yet another format
| control character in the character encoding standard.
Couldn't the same once have been said of "advance to next line"?
Originally derived from 2 hardware control commands, but now made
abstract as LSEP?
There various ways to express the semantic "advance to next column"
in plain text, chiefly:
---insert enough spaces to make the lines line up;
---insert an HT character;
---insert a number of HT characters.
The descriptions for LSEP and PSEP say "may be used to express this
semantic unambiguously". Confronted by a requirement that the concept
of vertically-aligned columns might be an important part of plain text,
the consistent option seems to be a character whose only purpose is to
separate columns. This has 2 almost-immediate corollaries: (1) LSEP
should separate rows; (2) the scope of the columns should be limited in
some way, with PSEP being the obvious choice.
As I noted, it has exactly the same minimum implementation
requirements as HT, but it also gives the renderer the *option* of
doing nicer alignment, if it wants. So it needn't be complex.
It is certainly possible that the foundation on which this rests
("the concept of vertically-aligned columns is an important part of
plain text") is just not true---in which case trying to nail down the
semantics of HT seems like a logically impossible task, as it shares
that foundation.
/|
o o o (_|/
/|
(_/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT