Marco Cimarosti wrote as follows.
>As you see, it is nowhere said that markup is necessarily something
>beginning with "<" or any other character. The additional information
>("markup") can be in any format, in fact the definition says: "It is
>expected that systems and applications will implement proprietary forms".
Ah! The key point. So my courtyard codes are both fancy text and markup.
The fact that they do not enter a markup bubble but instead use individual
code points to convey the formatting information does not alter the fact
that they are markup.
>> [...] I am not knocking markup, [...]
>
>Of course you aren't! Your idea of defining format controls as PUA code
>point totally fits in the above definition.
Yes.
>So, FARMYARD CODES ARE IS JUST ONE MORE FORM OF MARKUP. And text including
>the controls IS NOT PLAIN TEXT: it is William Overington's own "proprietary
>form" of rich text.
I understand what you mean. However, as regards the second sentence in the
above quote, so as not to seem to agree tosomething with which I am not
agreeing, can I please say that in the dictionary before me at present, the
word proprietary is stated as an adjective meaning "belonging to owner; made
by firm with exclusive rights of manufacture", so I would not wish courtyard
codes to be regarded as a proprietary form of rich text. I fully accept
that you were probably not using the word proprietary to convey that meaning
but to convey a sense that I had made it up myself on my own initiative as
between making it up myself on my own initiative and it being devised by a
standardization body.
>You are out of Unicode rules not because you defined your Farmyard codes in
>the PUA (which is perfectly legal, as I explain below), but because you
fail
>to accept (or understand) that these codes are a form of markup, and that
>text containing them is a "proprietary form... of fancy text".
Yes. I now understand. Thank you for the explanation.
>The only questionable usage of PUA that I can think of is duplicating
>existing characters. But this would be an absurd deed. Your other proposal
>of defining PUA ligatures goes near to this, but not quite.
Well, I did not define codes for long s t ligature and st ligature in the
golden ligatures collection because they are already in regular Unicode.
Thank you for your help.
William Overington
14 August 2002
