Murray Sargent <murrays at exchange dot microsoft dot com> wrote:
It's worth remembering that plain text is a format that was introduced due to the limitations of early computers. Books have always been rendered with at least some degree of rich text. And due to the complexity of Unicode, even Unicode plain text often needs to be rendered with more than one font.
I disagree with this assessment of plain text. When you consider the basic equivalence of the "same" text written in longhand by different people, typed on a typewriter, finger-painted by a child, spray-painted through a stencil, etc., it's clear that the "sameness" is an attribute of the underlying plain text. None of these examples has anything to do with computers, old or new.
I do agree that rich text has existed for a long time, possibly as long as plain text (though I doubt that, when you consider really early writing technologies like palm leaves), but I don't think that refutes the independent existence of plain text. And I don't think the need to use more than one font to render some Unicode text implies it isn't plain text. I think that has more to do with aesthetics (a rich-text concept) and technical limits on font size.
-- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
