From: David Starner (prosfilaes@gmail.com)
Date: Mon Jun 30 2008 - 18:34:33 CDT
Plain text does a lousy job at "communicat[ing] and record[ing]
language electronically", especially when you get into specialized
notations like music and math. It's the wrong tool for the job, and
extending it to cover them will likely just add poorly supported
features. In some ways the worst thing about any sufficiently complex
format is when a feature is promised, but it turns out that when it's
used, half the systems don't read it properly. Unicode, unfortunately,
has that problem, but there's no need to exacerbate it.
Rich text formats come and go, but so does everything. The worst rich
text formats, IMO, are the ones that were created by people who
thought plain text was good enough, but then kludged in markup for
italics, bold, page numbers, whatever was need that day; it's almost
invariably ambiguous, and undocumented. In a thousand years, HTML
will be understandable, courtesy of printed books still stored in
libraries.
I think your claims for plain text are overstated; many documents have
non-plain text details that make them worth saving. "Flatland" is a
most odd book sans illustrations, and a volume of Rembrandt's
paintings is ludicrous in plain text. "A First Course in Real
Analysis" can not be preserved in plain text; if you think you have,
you've invented yet another of those ad-hoc not-quite-plain text
formats. (For example, the math offered by Kirill Smelkov only works
in monospace, which is a requirement above and beyond plain text, and
it's not computer-parseable; too bad for the blind who hoped that
computerized text could help them with mathematics...)
Furthermore, while typesetting may have been specialized, that does
not mean that other formats were plain text. Even ignoring
mathematics, a quick look through my writing reveals that I use
underlining quite frequently, and that was a feature often offered by
typewriters.
I think that people should think carefully about how they use rich
text formats. I do not, however, think that makes kludging Unicode to
support all the features of rich text you think you need the right
thing to do. It will reduce the reliability of Unicode and encourage
the proliferation of undocumented nearly-plain-text formats.
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