At 11:50 AM 11/18/02 +0100, Dominikus Scherkl wrote:
You might find it very un-nice in practice, since plain text editors/viewers are notorious for not supporting tagging of any kind. In fact, all you are likely to get are a series of uninterpreted black boxes for the tags.> I agree that in this example, higher-level markup would do > all that is necessary. But I'd like to read a "README.TXT" with a plain-text editor. These files are very common - and if they're not deprecated using plane-14-tags would be very nice to have in an multi-language readme (where higher-level tagging is not available).
As a result of being monofont plain text viewers/editors are also notorious for not supporting much beyond a limited repertoire of characters [a few noble exceptions to this rule notwithstanding].
Unless a widely used plain-text protocol requires or supports these characters, they remain a solution in search of a problem. I still haven't seen evidence of such a protocol.
Remember, just because something's in the standard doesn't mean that it's magically supported everywhere. If it can't be added to existing systems by simple font extension (or similar updates) it may not be supported for a long time: Until it's widely supported, it's de-facto not available to end-users.
A./
