> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Behalf Of Peter Kirk > Sent: Monday, April 05, 2004 3:09 PM
> Mike's nonsencical > statements that all legal texts are necessarily highly marked up.
Now I'm certain that you are trolling. I made no such statement.
Well, no, but you did twice suggest that plain text would not be used for legal documents. And by using "Unicode" and "e-mail" you clearly implied that you were talking about cyberspace documents rather than printed ones.
I did, however, possibly miss a word. "plain text Unicode" should be "printed plain text Unicode", as the width of a space is basically meaningless in cyberspace, but I thought that to be self evident.
Far from self-evident. The amended form of your statement is meaningless and self-contradictory, because Unicode is meaningful only in cyberspace and not to printred documents. Also there was no hint that you were referring to printed documents and a clear reference to e-mail. So of course I took you to mean what made sense in the context.
The width of a space is not meaningless in cyberspace. The Unicode standard specifies clearly several things about its width. That width becomes something real only when the text is displayed on a screen or printed. But something which is not yet realised is not thereby meaningless.
So, are you asking for "evidence that plain text is even being considered for use" in PRINTED legal documents, rather than ones in cyberspace? If that is what you want, I will send you a scan of a letting contract for my house, which, although clearly computer generated in 1997, uses plain text with a monospace font.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
