From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Thu Sep 27 2007 - 07:05:04 CDT
Dmitry Turin wrote:
> But these are the markup language once again.
>
> Plain text is used in _all_ type of documents
> (biologistic one, economistic one, texts of schoolchildren),
> and manufactorers of software must be prevented from embeding of
> _particular_ markup language into all system.
Really not! Those types of documents already use file formats that embed
internal markup, even if this is not visible in the rendered document. They
are not plain-text if they need such advanced features, or will try to adapt
to the absence of markup by building the layout using some sort of "ASCII
Art" that are not written using the normal orthographic convention of the
humane language in which the documents are written. This is not a defect:
those occurrences are not even in any humane language and do not follow the
normal orthography (so the "ASCII Art" is used in special occurrences where
a figure is expected, at the same place where an embedded image could be
placed if this was not a plan-text only document).
Plain-text only formats are not convenient to place figures, but there's
nothing that can be done to allow mixing different types of media; except if
you accept to use a rich-text format or try to make approximative figures
with "ASCII Art".
For mathematical formulas, either you want to render them in their original
bi-dimensional layout, and then you'll need internal markup (so plain-text
will not work), or you need an inline syntax to represent the semantic of
the formula, without being able to render it (but the 2D rendering can be
inferred from the given expression) and this will require some additional
convention (that the encoded plain-text does not fully encode, because there
are many uncounted conventions used in mathematics, probably as many as
mathematicians, that are constantly inventing new ones! and that's why they
start their works and demonstrations by a list of definitions and
conventions, or make several references to other related works, not defined
in the document itself).
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