Nobody has really addressed Andrew West's suggestion about using the tag characters.
It seems conformant, unobtrusive, requiring no official sanction, and could be supported by third-partiers in the absence of corporate interest if deemed desirable.
One argument against it might be: Whoa, that's just HTML. Why not just use HTML? SMH
One argument for it might be: Whoa, that's just HTML! Most everybody already knows about HTML, so a simple subset of HTML would be recognizable.
After revisiting the concept, it does seem elegant and workable. It would provide support for elements of writing in plain-text for anyone desiring it, enabling essential (or frivolous) preservation of editorial/authorial intentions in plain-text.
Am I missing something? (Please be kind if replying.) On 2019-01-20 10:35 AM, Andrew West wrote:
A possibility that I don't think has been mentioned so far would be to use the existing tag characters (E0020..E007F). These are no longer deprecated, and as they are used in emoji flag tag sequences, software already needs to support them, and they should just be ignored by software that does not support them. The advantages are that no new characters need to be encoded, and they are flexible so that tag sequences for start/end of italic, bold, fraktur, double-struck, script, sans-serif styles could be defined. For example start and end of italic styling could be defined as the tag sequences <i> and </i> (E003C E0069 E003E and E003C E002F E0069 E003E). Andrew
