From: Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven (asmodai@in-nomine.org)
Date: Tue Apr 14 2009 - 08:09:57 CDT
-On [20090414 11:19], Dennis Heuer (dh@triple-media.com) wrote:
>at least a constructive comment. but, the writing on the unicode site
>said that things are better discussed here first. if i can't gain
>traction here, is another proposal of any worth?
Your emails thus far have struck me as rather unstructured. A concrete, even
in draft, proposal might provide a more coherent and fleshed out document
that people can read and comment on.
>[and] the most basic formatting characters (bold, italic, etc.) are also
>well known. just take a look at the font dialog of your text writer.
>how to use them is known from given file formats: one can enclose a
>passage, which is more clear but needs more parsing, or only positively
>switch to the next formatting, like: <bold><italic>important<normal>.
>that's it. the symbols you can also take from your text writer. they
>are already very normative by defacto standard MS W*rd. as you can see,
>there's prior art to it.
The problem with introducing all sorts of aesthetic markup code to Unicode
makes it more of a design implementation rather than an orthographic one.
Furthermore, bold and italic are basically meaningless in the context of
many Asian languages. Let alone scripts like hieroglyphics or the likes. So
it would be a very selective subset for which your idea would float.
>you not? do you rather like blocks like:
>
>####################
>### this is info ###
>####################
This works rather well for my reStructured Text [1] documents actually. It
all depends on your target audience.
>only to be safe (you comment on everything): the placeholders written
>with angled braces in the above example are really meant to be
>understood as placeholders. the user would, instead, type a key or
>key-combination to set the respective formatting character.
And that is essentially different from typing, say, <b>text</b> for bold
text? Or using BBCode such as [b]text[/b]?
>btw., it seems that unicode smileys in emails are ok!? the unicode
>standard cares about a lot of nonsense (even clingon script, dreaming
>of being a cultural heritage archive (if not museum) instead of a
>technical standard). though, the most commonly used formattings shall
>not be of relevance??? again, what about all these spacing characters???
>did anyone of you bark about them not being available on his
>keyboard????
There are a multitude of control characters you use on a daily basis which
are not all present on your keyboard either.
Furthermore, there are quite a far number of humans in the world who
actively read and write Klingon and wanted to formally encode the
characters used. But as you can see, the proposal thus far never made it
into the standard. So your comment is rather off the mark.
>just make your own private statistics: how often did you use 'U+271D
>LATIN CROSS' and how often did you type bold formatted text this month.
Your analogy does not fly. One is a glyph that stands for a particular
meaning, often used in cartography or related fields to denote a church.
That you do not use it daily does nothing to invalidate its usefulness in
the context of the standard.
On the other hand I am sure a lot of my Asian friends hardly use bold with
their native language, simply because a convention such as bold does not
exist in their orthography.
[snip]
>i talked about it in several paragraphs in all of my emails to this
>mailinglist (except the first, which was about the namespace key.) if
>you can't read, what shall i do?
I would suggest a more civil tone.
[1] http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
-- Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B Sometimes the blind see more than those who see...
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