Re: Tag characters and in-line graphics (from Tag characters)

From: Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>
Date: Sun, 31 May 2015 23:26:45 +0200

The "abstract format" already exists also for HTML (with MIME "charset"
extension of the media-type "text/plain" (it can also be embedded in a meta
tag, where the HTML source file ius just stored in a filesystem, so that a
webserver can parse it and provide the correct MIME header, if the
webserver has no repository for metadata and must infer the media type from
the file content itself with some guesser).

It also exists in various conventions for source code (recognized by
editors such as vi(m) or Emacs, or for Unic shells using embedded "magic"
identifiers near the top of the file.

You can use it to send an identifier for a private charset without having
to request for a registration of the charset in the IANA database (which is
not intended for private encodings). The pricate chrset can be named a
unique way (consider using a private charset name based on a domain name
you own, such as "x-www.example.net-mycharset-1" if you own the domain name
"example.net"). It will be enough for the initial experimentation for a few
years (or more, provided that you renew this domain name). Your charset can
contain various defitnitions: a mapping of your codepoints (including PUAs,
or standard codepoints, or "hacked" codepoints if you have no other
solution to get the correct character properties working with existing
algorithms such as case mappings, collation, layout behavior in text
renderers).

Such solution would allow a more predictable management of PUAs (byt
allowing to control their scope of use, by binding them, only in some magic
header of the document, to a private charset that remains reasonnably
unique. for example "x-example.net-mycharset-1" would map to an URL like "//
www.example.net/mycharset/1/" containing some schema (it could be the base
adress of an XML of JSON file, and of a web font containing the relevant
glyphs, and of a character properties database to override the default ones
from the standard: if you already know this private charset in your
application, you don't need to download any of these files, the URL is just
an identifier and you file can still be used in standalone mode, just like
you can parse many standard XML schemas by just recognizing the URLs
assigned to the XML namespaces, without even having to find a DTD or XML
schema definition from an external resource; if needed you app can contain
a local repository in some cache folder where you can extend the number of
private "charsets" that can be recognized).

----
Full interopability will still not be possible if you need to mix in the
same document texts encoded with different private charsets (there's always
a risk of collision), without a way to reencode some of them to a joined
charset without the collisions) by infering a new private charset (it's not
impossible to do, after all this is done already with XML schemas that you
can mix together: you just need to rename the XML namespaces, keeping the
URLs to which they are bound, when there's a collision on the XML namespace
names, a situation that occurs sometimes because of versioning where some
features of a schema are not fully upward compatible).
Yes this complicate things a bit, but much less than when using documents
in which PUA assignments are not negociated at all (even minimally to make
sure they are compatible when mixing sources); and for which there exits
for now absolutely no protocol defined for such negociation (TUS says that
PUAs are usable and interchangeable under "private mutual agreement" but
still provides no schemes for supporting such mutual agreement, and for
this reason, PUAs are alsmost always rejected, and people want true
permanent assignments for characters that are very specific, badly
documented, or insufficiently known to have reliable permanent properties).
So let's think about securing the use of PUAs with some identification
scheme (for plain-text formats, it should just be allowed to negocaite a
single charset for the whole, using the "magic" header tricks that re used
since long by charset guessers (including for autodetecting UTF-8 encoded
files).
This would also solve the chicken-and-egg problem where we need more
sources to attest an effective usage before encoding new characters, but
developping this usages is extremely difficult (and much slower) in our
modern technologies where most documents are now handled numerically (in
the past it was possible to create a metal font and use it immediately to
start editing books, and there were many more people using handwriting and
drawings, so it was much less difficult to invent new characters, than it
is today, unless you're a big company that has enough resources to develop
this usage alone, such as Japanese telcos or Google, Yahoo, Samsung or
Microsoft introducing new sets of Emojis for their instant messaging
platform, with tons of developers working for them to develop a wide range
of services around it...)
However I'm not saying that Unicode should specify how such private charset
containing private assignments could be inserted in headers (I just think
that it should describe a mechanism and give example of how common text
formats are already used to convery some "magic" identifiers near the top
of the file, and then we could describe a service allowing to locate and
retrieve the associated definitions of this identifier, and some
interchangeable format for these informations.
2015-05-31 17:50 GMT+02:00 Asmus Freytag (t) <asmus-inc_at_ix.netcom.com>:
>  On 5/31/2015 5:33 AM, Chris-as-John wrote:
>
>
>  Yes, Asmus good post. But I don’t really think HTML, even a subset, is
> really the right solution.
>
>
> The longer I think about this, what would be needed would be something
> like an "abstract" format. A specification of the capabilities to be
> supported and the types of properties needed to support them in an
> extensible way. HTML and CSS would possibly become an implementation of
> such a specification.
>
> There would still be a place for a character set, that is Unicode, as an
> efficient way to implement the most basic and most standard features of
> text contents, but perhaps some extension mechanism that can handle various
> extensions.
>
> The first level of extension is support for recent (or rare) code points
> in the character set (additional fonts, etc, as you mention).
>
> The next level of extension could be support for collections of custom
> entities that are not available as character sets (stickers and the like).
>
> And finally, there would have to be a way to deal with "one-offs", such as
> actual images that do not form categorizable sets, but are used in an
> ad-hoc manner and behave like custom characters.
>
> And so on.
>
> It should be possible to describe all of this in a way that allows it to
> be mapped to HMTL and CSS or to any other rich text format -- the goal,
> after all is to make such "inline text" as widely and effortlessly
> interchangeable as plain text is today (or at least nearly so).
>
> By keeping the specification abstract, you could accommodate both SGML
> like formats where ascii-string markup is intermixed with the text, as well
> as pure text buffers with place holder code points and links to external
> data.
>
> But, however bored you are with plain Unicode emoji, as long as there
> isn't an agreed upon common format for rich "inline text" I see very little
> chance that those cute facebook emoji will do anything other than firmly
> keep you in that particular ghetto.
>
> A./
>
>  I’m reminded of the design for XML itself, it is supposed to start with
> a header that defines what that XML will conform to. Those definitions
> contain some unique identifiers of that XML schema, which happens to be a
> URL. The URL is partly just a convenient unique identifier, but also, the
> XML engine, if it doesn’t know about that schema could go to that URL and
> download the schema, and check that the XML  conforms to that schema.
>
>  Similarly, imagine a text format that had a header with something like:
> \uCHARSET:facebook.com/charsets/pusheen-the-cat-emoji/,12345
>
>  Now all the characters following in the text will interpret characters
> that start with 12345 with respect to that character set. What would you
> find at at facebook.com/charsets/pusheen-the-cat-emoji/? You might find
> bitmaps, truetype fonts, vector graphics, etc. You might find many many
> representations of that character set that your rendering engine could
> cache for future use. The text format wouldn’t be reliant on today’s
> favorite rendering technology, whether bitmap, truetype fonts, or whatever.
> Right now, if you go to a website that references unicode that your
> platform doesn’t know about, you see nothing. If a format like this
> existed, character sets would be infinitely extensible, everybody on earth
> could see characters, even if their platform wasn’t previously aware of
> them, and the format would be independent of today’s rendering
> technologies. Let’s face it, HTML5 changes every few years, and I don’t
> think anybody wants the fundamental textual representation dependant on an
> entire layout engine. And also the whole range of what HTML5 can do, even
> some subset, is too much information. You don’t necessarily want your text
> to embed the actual character set. Perhaps that might be a useful option,
> but I think most people would want to uniquely identify the character set,
> in a way that an engine can download it, but without defining the actual
> details itself. Of course, certain charsets would probably become pervasive
> enough that platforms would just include them for convenience. Emojis by
> major messaging platforms. Maybe characters related to specialised domains
> like, I don’t know, mapping or specialised work domains or whatever, But
> without having to be subservient to the central unicode committee.
>
>  As someone who is a keen user of Facebook messenger, and who sees them
> bring out a new set of emoji almost every week, I think the world will soon
> be totally bored with the plain basic emoji that unicode has defined.
>
>
> —
> Chris
>
>
>  On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Asmus Freytag (t) <
> asmus-inc_at_ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
>>  reading this discussion, I agree with your reaductio ad absurdum of
>> infinitely nested HTML.
>>
>> But I think you are onto something with your hypothetical example of the
>> "subset that works in ALL textual situations".
>>
>> There's clearly a use case for something like it, and I believe many
>> people would intuitively agree on a set of features for it.
>>
>> What people seem to have in mind is something like "inline" text.
>> Something beyond a mere stream of plain text (with effectively every
>> character rendered visibly), but still limited in important ways by general
>> behavior of inline text: a string of it, laid out, must wrap and line
>> break, any objects included in it must behave like characters (albeit of
>> custom width, height and appearance), and so on. Paragraph formatting,
>> stacked layout, header levels and all those good things would not be
>> available.
>>
>> With such a subset clearly defined, many quirky limitations might no
>> longer be necessary; any container that today only takes plain text could
>> be upgraded to take "inline text". I can see some inline containers
>> retaining a nesting limitation, but I could imagine that it is possible to
>> arrive at a consistent definition of such inline format.
>>
>> Going further, I can't shake the impression that without a clean
>> definition of an inline text format along those lines, any attempts at
>> making stickers and similar solutions "stick" are doomed to failure.
>>
>> The interesting thing in defining such a format is not how to represent
>> it in HTML or CSS syntax, but in describing what feature sets it must
>> (minimally) support. Doing it that way would free existing implementations
>> of rich text to map native formats onto that minimally required subset and
>> to add them to their format translators for HMTL or whatever else they use
>> for interchange.
>>
>> Only with a definition can you ever hope to develop a processing model.
>> It won't be as simple as for plain text strings, but it should be able to
>> support common abstractions (like iteration by logical unit). It would have
>> to support the management of external resources - if the inline format
>> allows images, custom fonts, etc. one would need a way to manage references
>> to them in the local context.
>>
>> If your skeptical position proves correct in that this is something that
>> turns out to not be tractable, then I think you've provided conclusive
>> proof why stickers won't happen and why encoding emoji was the only
>> sensible decision Unicode could have taken.
>>
>> A./
>>
>> On 5/30/2015 7:14 AM, John wrote:
>>
>>
>>  Hmm, these "once entities" of which you speak, do they require
>> javascript? Because I'm not sure what we are looking for here is static
>> documents requiring a full programming language.
>>
>>  But let's say for a moment that html5 can, or could do the job here.
>> Then to make the dream come true that you could just cut and paste text
>> that happened to contain a custom character to somewhere else, and nothing
>> untoward would happen, would mean that everything in the computing universe
>> should allow full blown html. So every Java Swing component, every Apple
>> gui component, every .NET component, every windows component, every
>> browser, every Android and IOS component would allow text entry of HTML
>> entities. OK, so let's say everyone agrees with this course of action, now
>> the universal text format is HTML.
>>
>>  But in this new world where anywhere that previously you could input
>> text, you can now input full blown html, does that actually make sense?
>> Does it make sense that you can for example, put full blown HTML inside a
>> H1 tag in html itself? That's a lot of recursion going on there. Or in a
>> MS-Excel cell? Or interspersed in some otherwise fairly regular text in a
>> Word document?
>>
>>  I suppose someone could define a strict limited subset of HTML to be
>> that subset that makes sense in ALL textual situations. That subset would
>> be something like just defining things that act like characters, and not
>> like a full blown rendering engine. But who would define that subset? Not
>> the HTML groups, because their mandate is to define full blown rendering
>> engines. It would be more likely to be something like the unicode group.
>>
>>  And also, in this brave new world where HTML5 is the new standard text
>> format, what would the binary format of it be? I mean, if I have the string
>> of unicode characters <IMG would that be HTML5 image definition that should
>> be rendered as such? Or would it be text that happens to contain greater
>> than symbol, I, M and G? It would have to be the former I guess, and
>> thereby there would no longer be a unicode symbol for the mathematical
>> greater than symbol. Rather there would be a unicode symbol for opening a
>> HTML tag, and the text code for greater than would be &gt; Never again
>> would a computer store > to mean greater than. Do we want HTML to be so
>> pervasive? Not sure it deserves that.
>>
>>  And from a programmers point of view, he wants to be able to iterate
>> over an array of characters and treat each one the same way, regardless if
>> it is a custom character or not. Without that kind of programmatic
>> abstraction, the whole thing can never gain traction. I don't think fully
>> blown HTML embedded in your text can fulfill that. A very strictly defined
>> subset, possibly could. Sure HTML5 can RENDER stuff adquately, if the only
>> aim of the game is provide a correct rendering. But to be able to actually
>> treat particular images embedded as characters, and have some programming
>> library see that abstraction consistently, I'm not sure I'm convinced that
>> is possible. Not without nailing down exactly what html elements in what
>> particular circumstances constitute a "character".
>>
>>  I guess in summary, yes we have the technology already to render
>> anything. But I don't think the whole standards framework does anything to
>> allow the computing universe to actually exchange custom characters as if
>> they were just any other text. Someone would actually have to  work on a
>> standard to do that, not just point to html5.
>>
>>
>> On Saturday, 30 May 2015 at 5:08 am, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p_at_wanadoo.fr>,
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> 2015-05-29 4:37 GMT+02:00 John <idou747_at_gmail.com>:
>>>
>>>>  "Today the world goes very well with HTML(5) which is now the bext
>>>> markup language for document (including for inserting embedded images that
>>>> don’t require any external request”
>>>> If I had a large document that reused a particular character thousands
>>>> of times, would this HTML markup require embedding that character thousands
>>>> of times, or could I define the character once at the beginning of the
>>>> sequence, and then refer back to it in a space efficient way?
>>>>
>>>
>>>  HTML(5) allows defining *once* entities for images that can then be
>>> reused thousands of times without repeting their definition. You can do
>>> this as well with CSS styles, just define a class for a small element. This
>>> element may still be an "image", but the semantic is carried by the class
>>> you assign to it. You are not required to provide an external source URL
>>> for that image if the CSS style provides the content.
>>>
>>>  You may also use PUAs for the same purpose (however I have not seen
>>> how CSS allows to style individual characters in text elements as these
>>> characters are not elements, and there's no defined selector for
>>> pseudo-elements matching a single character). PUAs are perfectly usable in
>>> the situation where you have embedded a custom font in your document for
>>> assigning glyphs to characters (you can still do that, but I would avoid
>>> TrueType/OpenType for this purpose, but would use the SVG font format which
>>> is valid in CSS, for defining a collection of glyphs).
>>>
>>>  If the document is not restricted to be standalone, of course you can
>>> use links to an external shared CSS stylesheet and to this SVG font
>>> referenced by the stylesheet. With such approach, you don't even need to
>>> use classes on elements, you use plain-text with very compact PUAs (it's up
>>> to you to decide if the document must be standalone (embedding everything
>>> it needs) or must use external references for missing definitions, HTML
>>> allows both (and SVG as well when it contains plain-text elements).
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
Received on Sun May 31 2015 - 16:29:00 CDT

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