2012-07-20 20:19, Asmus Freytag wrote:
On 7/20/2012 8:41 AM, Karl Pentzlin wrote:
Looking for an example of "plain text" which is obvious to anybody,
it seems to me that the "Subject" field of e-mails is a good example.
By common convention, certain notational features have been relegated to
styled text. Super and subscript in mathematical, chemical and other
notation belongs to that class.
I’m afraid I don’t quite follow. Superscripts and subscripts can be
presented using styling or other higher-level protocols, or specialized
superscript or subscript characters can be used, in many cases. But this
does not seem to be relevant to the question whether “Subject” fields
are a good example of plain text.
A much stronger case than subject lines are regulatory databases with
plain-text fields in their records.
It’s part of the database design to decide whether fields are plain
text, so I don’t quite get the point. Sometimes people would like plain
text to cover things that do not exist as Unicode characters now, but
that’s a different topic.
If the users for which such "near plain text" notations are part of
their daily work were to report that subject lines, database "plain
text" fields and other such bottlenecks are causing serious issues, then
I think Unicode and WG2 should listen carefully.
Instead of getting into theoretical considerations of “near plain text”,
I think the question is whether there is sufficient evidence of
real-life needs for new subscript or superscript characters. In general,
coding of new characters requires demonstrated *use* of symbols as text
characters, rather than arguments about *need* to use them. But even the
need is questionable: e-mail headings are supposed to be short texts
that tell what the message is about, not complicated formulas. And it’s
part of database design to decide that you use some fields for some
purposes and make them plain text fields, instead of (somehow) allowing
styling inside them.
Yucca
