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