David Starner wrote,
> You're emailing from Gmail, which has support for italics in email.
But I compose e-mails in BabelPad, which has support for far more than
italics in HTML mail. And I'm using Mozilla Thunderbird to send and
receive text e-mail via the Gmail account.
And if I wanted to /display/ italics in a web page, I would create the
source file in a plain-text editor. (HTML mark-up is fairly easy to
type with the ASCII keyboard.)
If I compose a text file in BabelPad, it can be opened in many rich-text
applications and the information survives intact. Unless I am foolish
enough to edit the file in the rich-text application and file-save it.
Because that mungs the plain-text file, and it can no longer be
retrieved by the plain-text editor which created it.
>> ...third-party...
>
> Where are these tools?
BabelPad is an outstanding example. Earlier in this discussion a web
search found at least a handful of third-party tools devoted to
liberating the math-alphas for Twitter users.
> The superscripts show a problem with multiple encoding; even if you
> think they should be Unicode superscripts, and they look like Unicode
> superscripts, they might be HTML superscripts. Same thing would happen
> with italics if they were encoded in Unicode.
Hmmm. Rich-text styled italics might be copied into other rich-text
applications, but they cannot be copied into plain-text apps. If
Unicode-enabled italics existed, plain-text italics could be copy/pasted
into either rich-text or plain-text applications and survive intact. So
Unicode-enabled italics would be interoperable. Anyone concerned about
interoperability would be well advised to go with plain-text. I am, so
I do. When I can.
Kie eksistas fumo, tie eksistas fajro.
