William Overington wrote:
> Marco Cimarosti wrote as follows.
>
> >As you see, it is nowhere said that markup is necessarily something
> >beginning with "<" or any other character. The additional information
> >("markup") can be in any format, in fact the definition says: "It is
> >expected that systems and applications will implement
> proprietary forms".
>
> Ah! The key point.
Yes!
> So my courtyard codes are both fancy text and markup.
Right. Precisely, the codes are markup and a text document using them would
be fancy text.
> The fact that they do not enter a markup bubble but instead
> use individual
> code points to convey the formatting information does not
> alter the fact
> that they are markup.
Precisely so. BTW, these "markup bubbles" are typical of SGML (i.e., HTML
and XML). Binary markup (e.g. the format or MS Word's ".doc" files) often
uses single-unit formatting codes, similar to your Farmyard codes. E.g.,
codes like start/end italic/bold are a single bytes in many word processor
formats.
> [...] can I please say that in the dictionary before me
> at present, the word proprietary is stated as an adjective
> meaning "belonging to owner; made by firm with exclusive
> rights of manufacture",
I guess that that is the proper English meaning. In the Unicode definitions
(and in the IT world in general), the term is used in the broader sense:
"not defined in a public standard". The extension of meaning probably comes
from the fact that software things not defined in a public standard are
often the patented property of some company.
> so I would not wish courtyard
> codes to be regarded as a proprietary form of rich text. I
> fully accept
> that you were probably not using the word proprietary to
> convey that meaning
> but to convey a sense that I had made it up myself on my own
> initiative as
> between making it up myself on my own initiative and it being
> devised by a
> standardization body.
In the context of the Unicode glossary, I guess that "proprietary" has been
used in an even more indirect and improper meaning: "anything which is not
specified by Unicode itself". As you see, the term is also used to cover
HTML or SGML, which are actually public standards, not the patented property
of any company.
> Yes. I now understand. Thank you for the explanation.
You are welcome.
_ Marco
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