From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Dec 09 2003 - 09:04:20 EST
jcowan@reutershealth.com writes:
> Philippe Verdy scripsit:
> > XML files are definitely NOT plain text (if this was the case,
> > then it would be forbidden to interpret "<" as a special markup
> > character instead of the standard Unicode base character with
> > its associated glyph)...
>
> You might as well say that C code is not plain text because it too is
> subject to special canons of interpretation. But both XML/HTML/SGML
> and the various programming languages are plain text: they are written
> with plain-text editors, manipulated with plain-text tools, and can be
> rendered with plain-text renderers. The fact that other things can be
> done with them is neither here nor there.
The fact that plain-text renderers are used is not relevant here as
any normalization the renderer would use is hidden in the background
and the renderer does not expose the transformations it makes to the
editor itself.
Also, noboby uses an editor that performs implicit normalization of
text when saving file. If there's such an editor that can do it on the
fly, this option should be disabled for source files. It's best for
editors to allow the user select the parts in the text to normalize,
and then apply normalization only in these selected parts.
A more simple editor could implement a global normalization, but this
should be an explicit editing action from the user. For various reasons,
I would not like to use any Unicode plain-text editor that implicitly
normalizes the text without asking me, to work on programming source
files or XML or HTML files. But I will accept it, if the editor really
understands the language or XML syntax (and exhibits it to the user with
syntax coloring).
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