Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela at cs dot tut dot fi> wrote:
Human writing did not originate as plain text, and at the surface level, it is never "plain text": it always has some specific physical appearance, and abstract "plain text" can only be found below the surface, as the underlying data format where only character identities (character numbers in a specific code) are encoded, with no reference to a particular rendering.
I have the same trouble with this argument that I had last time it was made. Your handwritten A and mine may look different, and both may differ from a typewritten A, but they have something in common that allows us to identify them with each other. The whole premise of reading and writing is that we look below the surface to the identity of the letters and the meaning of the words.
Saying that rendering text always has an appearance is not the same as saying that all text is rich text. The latter viewpoint is what leads some people to propose nonce variations in penmanship as Unicode characters.
-- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ is dot gd slash 2kf0s
