From: Michael D'Errico (mike-list@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Jan 06 2009 - 00:22:54 CST
>> The whole point of my proposal is to make plain text
>> capable of handling more complex "thingies" like the
>> emoji without markup.
>
> But you're blurring the lines between plain text and markup:
> what you're suggesting *is* markup, but you're just calling
> it plain text.
Without markup in the sense that you don't need XML. For
example, instead of the following address:
<number>1234</number> <street>Park Avenue</street>
<city>New York</city> <state>New York</state>
you could just write it directly in 4 separate alphabets,
which contain the same characters at the same positions
within each, but with an added meaning to the text implied
by which script is in use. So the above XML would be
written directly as:
[1234] [Park Avenue]
[New York] [New York]
where the [] brackets denote a particular script is in
use. Software that was aware of the Unicode subset, but
not of the extra meaning can still render the above, even
if the scripts are from the structured private use plane.
Hence the term Direct Unicode Markup: it's markup, but
directly part of the Unicode repertoire, so it acts like
plain text.
There is a chasm a mile wide between plain text and XML
and this is a way to bring them closer together.
Mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Jan 06 2009 - 00:26:04 CST