XML has become the de facto standard for fancy text. It is therefore useful to explore ways and means of bringing XML into plain text, since obviously plain text is simpler than, and superior to, fancy text. The current method involving & and < and > and / and who knows what else is obviously much too complicated, and cannot interoperate with even the simplest plain text. Fortunately, the characters in planes 4 through B can come to our rescue.
Plane 4 will be divided into mini-blocks of 32 (or perhaps 64) characters. The Unicode Consortium will allocated these on the usual basis (first come first served, once and for all, and free) to users for the representation of start-tags. For example, supposing that block 40000 was allocated to the W3C HTML WG, we might represent <html> as U+40000, <head> as U+40001, <body> as U+40002, and so on. In this way, the start-tag (exclusive of attributes and attribute values) is reduced to a single character. The last block will not be allocated; U+4FFFC will be used to indicate the beginning of a comment, and U+4FFFD the beginning of a processing instruction. Plane 5 will be automatically assigned in parallel to plane 4 for the representation of end-tags: thus, U+50000 would be </html>. U+5FFFC and U+5FFFD will have the obvious meanings. Plane 6 will also be allocated as mini-blocks and used for the representation of attribute names. If a Plane 4 character is followed by a Plane 6 character, then the start-tag has at least one attribute. The last mini-block will not be allocated; 6FFFD will be used to indicate that the current tag has no more attributes. Plane 7 is reserved for future use. Planes 8 through A are clones of planes 0 through 3 respectively, and are used to represent attribute value, comment, and processing instruction text. In this way, only character content is encoded using traditional Unicode characters. It is expected that a secondary market in mini-blocks would eventually arise. -- "But I am the real Strider, fortunately," John Cowan he said, looking down at them with his face [EMAIL PROTECTED] softened by a sudden smile. "I am Aragorn son http://www.ccil.org/~/cowan of Arathorn, and if by life or death I can http://www.reutershealth.com save you, I will." --LotR Book I Chapter 10
