plain text (was RE: Coloured diacritics (Was: Transcoding Tamil in the presence of markup)

From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Tue Dec 09 2003 - 12:20:36 EST

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    > From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org]
    On Behalf
    > Of jcowan@reutershealth.com

    > XML files most certainly are plain text

    XML *can* be interpreted as plain text, or it can be interpreted as
    something *other* than plain text (i.e. XML). This ambiguity exists for
    any other plain-text-based markup format, such as RTF, Postscript, ...

    Perhaps we need some new terminology here. It might be helpful to
    describe an XML file as a "plain-text-markup file" (PTM, for acronym
    lovers), but reserve the term "plain text file" for files that contain
    text with no markup. Note that the terms being defined are "xxx file",
    not simply "plain text". Thus, John can continue to say that XML is
    plain text, but in some contexts that wouldn't be as useful as saying
    "XML files are plain-text-markup files".

    Peter
     
    Peter Constable
    Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies
    Microsoft Windows Division



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