On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 12:56 AM Tex <texte...@xencraft.com> wrote: > > David, > > "italics has never been considered part of plain text and has always been > considered outside of plain text. " > > Time to change the definition if that is what is holding you back.
That's not a definition; that's a fact. Again, it's like the 8-bit byte; there are systems with other sizes of byte, but you usually shouldn't worry about it. Building systems that don't have 8-bit bytes are possible, but it's likely to cost more than it's worth. > As has been said before, interlinear annotation, emoji and other features of > Unicode which are now considered plain text were not in the original > definition. https://www.w3.org/TR/unicode-xml/#Interlinear (which used to be Unicode Technical Report #20) says "The interlinear annotation characters were included in Unicode only in order to reserve code points for very frequent application-internal use. ... Including interlinear annotation characters in marked-up text does not work because the additional formatting information (how to position the annotation,...) is not available. ... The interlinear annotation characters are also problematic when used in plain text, and are not intended for that purpose." Emoji, as have been pointed out several times, were in the original Unicode standard and date back to the 1980s; the first DOS character page has similes at 0x01 and 0x02. > If Unicode encoded an italic mechanism it would be part of plain text, just > as the many other styled spaces, dashes and other characters have become > plain text despite being typographic. If Unicode encoded an italic mechanism, then some "plain text" would include italics. Maybe it would be successful, and maybe it would join the interlinear annotation characters as another discouraged poorly supported feature. > As with the many problems with walls not being effective, you choose to > ignore the legitimate issues pointed out on the list with the lack of italic > standardization for Chinese braille, text to voice readers, etc. Text to voice readers don't have problems with the lack of italic standardization; they have problems with people using mathematical characters instead of actual letters. > The choice of plain text isn't always voluntary. The choice of using single-byte character sets isn't always voluntary. That's why we should use ISO-2022, not Unicode. Or we can expect people to fix their systems. What systems are we talking about, that support Unicode but compel you to use plain text? The use of Twitter is surely voluntary. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
