On 2/11/19 5:46 PM, Kent Karlsson via Unicode wrote:
Continuing too look deep into the crystal ball, doing some more
hand swirls...
...
...
The scheme quoted (far) below (from wjgo_10009), or anything like it,
will NEVER be part of Unicode!
Not in Unicode, but I have to say I'm intrigued by the idea of writing
HTML with tag characters (not even necessarily "restricted" HTML: the
whole deal). This does NOT make it possible to write "italics in plain
text," since you aren't writing plain text. But what you can do is
write rich text (HTML) that Just So Happens to look like plain text when
rendered with a plain-text-renderer (and maybe there could be
plain-text-renderers that straddle the line, maybe supporting some
limited subset of HTML and doing boldface and italics or something.
BUT, this would NOT be a Unicode feature/catastrophe at all. This would
be purely the decision of the committee in charge of HTML/XML and
related standards, to decide to accept Unicode tag characters as if they
were ASCII for the purposes of writing XML tags/attributes &c. It's
totally nothing to do with Unicode, unless the XML folks want Unicode to
change some properties on the tag chars or something. I think it's a...
fascinating idea, and probably has *disastrous* consequences lurking
that I haven't tried to think of yet, but it's not a Unicode idea.
~mark
