From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Thu Dec 25 2008 - 16:26:44 CST
Asmus Freytag wrote:
> Punctuation marks are not the only devices beyond letters that people
> feel are necessary to employ as distinction between otherwise identical
> statements. Publishers, editors and authors of books in English, but not
> necessarily all other European languages, occasionally seem to find it
> necessary to employ italics to disambiguate between two possible
> interpretations of a given sequence of words.
Indeed. But that is typography -- a 'higher level protocol' -- not
character encoding. The question is not whether emoticons are used or
may be useful, but whether the kind of information that they seek to
convey belongs in plain text. I think it is consistent with type size
selection, font style selection, and other articulatory aspects of
display above the plain text level.
John Hudson
--
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com
The Lord entered her to become a servant.
The Word entered her to keep silence in her womb.
The thunder entered her to be quiet.
-- St Ephrem the Syrian
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