OK, then perhaps the idea of "recommended maximum line length" is an
unnecessary complication. Perhaps it is enough to say that Line
Separator means what it says. If I put one in my text, then it means
to start a new line. If I make sure that there are no more than 79
characters between line separators (or whatever else is appropriate
to my writing system), I'll get the desired effect.
> As for the concerns about the ephemeral nature of markup languages,
> hopefully we will someday reach some stability for systems that
> don't require a proprietary encoder, do not require extensive
> computer training to grok and do not have flavour of the week
> problems. These difficulties are not inherent in the design of
> markup languages but an artifact of the political and economic
> forces driving them.
>
Right, of course. But we can we trust the market to settle on a simple
standard for plain text? Of course not; there's no money in it.
Does the market want an immutable standard for plain-text documents that
can last for a century or an eon? Of course not. The market wants
everything to change all the time, so everybody will have to "upgrade"
constantly.
That's great for business but bad for preservation of history and
culture. And it shortens the productive lives of "content providers".
There are ways to make money that don't require artificially induced
instability.
Furthermore, I would not like to think that in the Unicode world of
the future, that it will not be possible to send preformatted email
or netnews without the assistance of some specific markup language
or embedded proprietary word-processor codes. Email has already
deteriorated significantly from its original openness thanks to MIME's
blessing of any kind of proprietary gewgaw any vendor wants to add
to their GUI email clients. Thus a perfect application for Unicode
plain text would be as a MIME type, specifically intended to proclaim
and promote the adherence to a simple, universal, vendor-independent,
self-contained standard. Hopefully the IETF would have the sense to
see the value of a Unicode successor to RFC822.
So I'd like to see a definition for plain text in the Unicode standard,
that is totally independent of any external product, that allows a
file or stream of Unicode text to stand on its own, for all time, and
retain a minimum level of formatting, in those cases where the author
of the text feels formatting is important. (In fact, all of us do,
otherwise we wouldn't care so much about fonts and rendering engines
and markup languages). I think email and netnews are two areas where
the need for such a standard is evident.
- Frank
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:48 EDT