On Thu, Aug 27, 2020 at 06:02:43PM -0600, Grant Taylor wrote: > On 8/27/20 11:55 AM, Ashley Dixon wrote: > > Nevertheless, as xkcd so brilliantly explains, TeX inspires a level of blind > > trust in the content of a document [2]. As long as you avoid proposing > > standards in the form of an animated GIF, you're probably going to be OK. > > ;-) > > I wonder if this is a side effect of the fact that TeX / LaTeX is a > difficult markup language to work in and takes considerably more time and > effort than simple text. As such, there is a good chance that the idea that > someone takes the time to express in (La)TeX is probably more completely > thought out than simple text. After all, why would someone spend the time > and exert the effort to finely polish a half baked idea in (La)TeX?
I might have worded it ambiguously in my initial response, but I only suggested TeX be used once his idea had surpassed the "half-baked" stage. I can't really comment on LaTeX, because I've never really used it; from the small snippets I've seen, I just assume it's TeX with a hell of a lot of useful macros. I've always just stuck to TeX, with a copy of the TeXBook handy. The only significant issue I have with plain TeX are the difficulties regarding CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean), considering I write many documents in Trad. Chinese and Japanese. I heard XeTeX fixed this, although I've never tried it. > Given that things grow and evolve, I think it means that the reference > implementation needs to be used /somewhere/ for the people maintaining it to > gain experience and knowledge germane to said reference implementation. > Granted, this can be a small subset and does not need to be on the front > lines. Yes, my comment was regarding production deployments of HillaryMail. > I also think that it's important to keep in mind that sometimes there are > external limitations that dictate what can and can not be done. Like the > fact that communications circuits were not guaranteed to be 8-bit clean when > email (RFC 822 and what predates it) and SMTP (RFC 821 and what predates > it). It's not any more fair to blame the authors of RFC 821 for not > supporting 8-bit than it is to blame Sir Tim Burners-Lee for not including > encryption when he developed HTML and HTTP. Absolutely, but we are not talking about the absence of features here: rather the addition of "features" to arbitrarily limit the flexibility of a transportation protocol. Sir Burners-Lee would certainly be on my list-of- undesirables if he took steps to _prevent_ encryption from ever appearing in future versions of the protocol! ;-) -- Ashley Dixon suugaku.co.uk 2A9A 4117 DA96 D18A 8A7B B0D2 A30E BF25 F290 A8AA
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