Re: Encoding italic

Responding to David Starner,

It’s true that most users can’t be troubled to take the extra time
needed to insert any kind of special characters which aren’t covered by
the keyboard.  Even the enthusiasts among us seldom take the trouble to
include ‘proper’ quotes and apostrophes in e-mails — even for posting to
specialized lists such as this one where other members might notice and
appreciate the extra effort involved.  Even though /we/ know how to do
it and have software installed to help us do it.

It’s also true that standard U.S. keyboards and drivers aren’t very
helpful with diacritics.  Yet when we reply to list colleagues with
surnames such as “Dürst” or “Bień”, we usually manage to get it right. 
Sure, the “reply” feature puts the surname into the response for us and
the e-mail software adds the properly spelled names into our address
books automatically.  But when we cite those colleagues in a post
replying to some other list member, we typically take the time and
trouble to write their names correctly.  Not only because we /can/, but
because we /should/.

> How do you envision this working?

Splendidly!  (smile)  Social platforms, plain-text editors, and other
applications do enhance their interfaces based on user demand from time
to time.  User demand, at least on Twitter, seems established.  As
pointed out previously in this discussion, that demand doesn’t seem to
result in much “Chicago style” text (although I have personally observed
some) and may only be a passing fad /for Twitter users/.  When corporate
interests aren't interested, third-party developers develop tools.

> You've yet to demonstrate that interoperability is an actual problem.

Copy/pasting from a web page into a plain-text editor removes any
italics content, which is currently expected behavior.  Opinions differ
as to whether that represents mere format removal or a loss of meaning. 
Those who consider it as a loss of meaning would perceive a problem with
interoperability.

Consider superscript/subscript digits as a similar styling issue. The
Wikipedia page for Romanization of Chinese includes information about
the Wade-Giles system’s tone marks, which are superscripted digits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Chinese

Copy/pasting an example from the page into plain-text results in “ma1,
ma2, ma3, ma4”, although the web page displays the letters as italic and
the digits as (italic) superscripts.  IMO, that’s simply wrong with
respect to the superscript digits and suboptimal with respect to the
italic letters.

> To expand on what Mark E. Shoulson said, to add new italics characters,
> you're going to need to not only copy all of Latin, but also Cyrillic ...

I quite agree that expanding atomic italic encoding is off the table at
this point.  (And that italicized CJK ideographs are daft.)
Received on Mon Jan 21 2019 - 01:51:46 CST