Jonathan suggested:
>
> My thoughts on this indicate that explicit tab widths are not
> appropriate: the only real requirement for plain text is that the
> columns line up. So we could have a character
>
> COLUMN SEPARATOR
>
> (CSEP) to go with LINE SEPARATOR (LSEP) and PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR (PSEP).
This isn't going to happen. Column alignment in tables is clearly a
higher-level document formatting issue -- not a problem to be solved
by attributing complex layout attributes to yet another format control
character in the character encoding standard.
>
> So the general form of a table would be
>
> PSEP ... CSEP ... CSEP ... LSEP
> ... CSEP ... LSEP
> ... CSEP ... CSEP ...
> PSEP
>
No, a table is an object defined at a higher level.
>
> | Whatever is chosen, let's keep it simple.
Frank got that one right. We already got TAB's, ineluctably. So define
some interoperable behavior on them, as is already done for the kind
of preformatted plain text Frank is talking about. Otherwise, use
spaces. Any other attempts to push more complex formatting down to the
bare minimum preformatted plain text format is bound to fail, IMO.
--Ken
>
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