From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Apr 13 2009 - 21:12:27 CDT
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 9:06 PM, Dennis Heuer <dh@triple-media.com> wrote:
> it's always the escape key!
Yes, because that's the tool that does the job. Why does it matter?
It's better to use existing ways, even if they're a little clunky,
then reinvent the wheel.
> escape sequences, instead, are
> generally just filtered out.
Not really; they tend to show up as junk, which is a very lightweight
form of error message for lightweight program.
> also, and i wrote that already, i doubt that unicode will ever be the
> only character set in use.
Okay, but for the last thirty years, there have been multiple
character sets. What you haven't shown is that it's better to handle
the changing character sets using Unicode-level characters, instead of
a higher level protocol.
> the main problem with 'international standards' (don't understand this
> argument. the international character-set standards didn't hinder the
> people behind unicode, did they?) is that they are complex, bloated,
> many, and not easy to parse
Of course the solution to "many" is to add another one. Every system
starts out simple until someone starts adding the features that people
want. There are many simple solutions out there, but they're far from
sufficient. At the least, extended character sets are notoriously hard
to input; people that traditionally used Latin-1 still often use --
emdashes and ' and " quotes in Unicode texts, because the correct
characters are hard to type. A bunch of new formatting characters are
going to be a pain to input and horrible to edit in systems that don't
have a "show formatting characters option". Most new formatting
systems are designed to be easy to enter from standard keyboards,
while your system needs a whole new UI for entering characters.
If you really need italics and bold in quote-unquote plain text,
there's an ISO standard of escape sequences for it. Again, it's been
there for decades; if everyone cared to support it, it would work just
fine. If there really was enough demand for this, people would have
supported it or something like it.
> this means that there are keys for most used sizes and steps
> like +1pt, +2pt, +5pt, and +10pt.
Gag me with a spoon. Yay, a formatting system that supports a limited
number of font sizes, so for any application that currently supports
half-decent typography has to continue carrying around formatting
codes for font sizes, that will interact in weird and annoying ways
with your Unicode-based formatting codes. Just about anything that
doesn't already support more font-size options then you have there,
doesn't want to support changing the font size at all. Consoles don't,
for one example. The common denominator for typography is pretty low.
-- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
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