John,
reading this discussion, I agree with your reaductio ad absurdum of
infinitely nested HTML.
But I think you are onto something with your hypothetical example of the
"subset that works in ALL textual situations".
There's clearly a use case for something like it, and I believe many
people would intuitively agree on a set of features for it.
What people seem to have in mind is something like "inline" text.
Something beyond a mere stream of plain text (with effectively every
character rendered visibly), but still limited in important ways by
general behavior of inline text: a string of it, laid out, must wrap and
line break, any objects included in it must behave like characters
(albeit of custom width, height and appearance), and so on. Paragraph
formatting, stacked layout, header levels and all those good things
would not be available.
With such a subset clearly defined, many quirky limitations might no
longer be necessary; any container that today only takes plain text
could be upgraded to take "inline text". I can see some inline
containers retaining a nesting limitation, but I could imagine that it
is possible to arrive at a consistent definition of such inline format.
Going further, I can't shake the impression that without a clean
definition of an inline text format along those lines, any attempts at
making stickers and similar solutions "stick" are doomed to failure.
The interesting thing in defining such a format is not how to represent
it in HTML or CSS syntax, but in describing what feature sets it must
(minimally) support. Doing it that way would free existing
implementations of rich text to map native formats onto that minimally
required subset and to add them to their format translators for HMTL or
whatever else they use for interchange.
Only with a definition can you ever hope to develop a processing model.
It won't be as simple as for plain text strings, but it should be able
to support common abstractions (like iteration by logical unit). It
would have to support the management of external resources - if the
inline format allows images, custom fonts, etc. one would need a way to
manage references to them in the local context.
If your skeptical position proves correct in that this is something that
turns out to not be tractable, then I think you've provided conclusive
proof why stickers won't happen and why encoding emoji was the only
sensible decision Unicode could have taken.
A./
On 5/30/2015 7:14 AM, John wrote:
Hmm, these "once entities" of which you speak, do they require
javascript? Because I'm not sure what we are looking for here is
static documents requiring a full programming language.
But let's say for a moment that html5 can, or could do the job here.
Then to make the dream come true that you could just cut and paste
text that happened to contain a custom character to somewhere else,
and nothing untoward would happen, would mean that everything in the
computing universe should allow full blown html. So every Java Swing
component, every Apple gui component, every .NET component, every
windows component, every browser, every Android and IOS component
would allow text entry of HTML entities. OK, so let's say everyone
agrees with this course of action, now the universal text format is HTML.
But in this new world where anywhere that previously you could input
text, you can now input full blown html, does that actually make
sense? Does it make sense that you can for example, put full blown
HTML inside a H1 tag in html itself? That's a lot of recursion going
on there. Or in a MS-Excel cell? Or interspersed in some otherwise
fairly regular text in a Word document?
I suppose someone could define a strict limited subset of HTML to be
that subset that makes sense in ALL textual situations. That subset
would be something like just defining things that act like characters,
and not like a full blown rendering engine. But who would define that
subset? Not the HTML groups, because their mandate is to define full
blown rendering engines. It would be more likely to be something like
the unicode group.
And also, in this brave new world where HTML5 is the new standard text
format, what would the binary format of it be? I mean, if I have the
string of unicode characters <IMG would that be HTML5 image definition
that should be rendered as such? Or would it be text that happens to
contain greater than symbol, I, M and G? It would have to be the
former I guess, and thereby there would no longer be a unicode symbol
for the mathematical greater than symbol. Rather there would be a
unicode symbol for opening a HTML tag, and the text code for greater
than would be > Never again would a computer store > to mean
greater than. Do we want HTML to be so pervasive? Not sure it deserves
that.
And from a programmers point of view, he wants to be able to iterate
over an array of characters and treat each one the same way,
regardless if it is a custom character or not. Without that kind of
programmatic abstraction, the whole thing can never gain traction. I
don't think fully blown HTML embedded in your text can fulfill that. A
very strictly defined subset, possibly could. Sure HTML5 can RENDER
stuff adquately, if the only aim of the game is provide a correct
rendering. But to be able to actually treat particular images embedded
as characters, and have some programming library see that abstraction
consistently, I'm not sure I'm convinced that is possible. Not without
nailing down exactly what html elements in what particular
circumstances constitute a "character".
I guess in summary, yes we have the technology already to render
anything. But I don't think the whole standards framework does
anything to allow the computing universe to actually exchange custom
characters as if they were just any other text. Someone would actually
have to work on a standard to do that, not just point to html5.
On Saturday, 30 May 2015 at 5:08 am, Philippe Verdy
<verd...@wanadoo.fr <mailto:verd...@wanadoo.fr>>, wrote:
2015-05-29 4:37 GMT+02:00 John <idou...@gmail.com
<mailto:idou...@gmail.com>>:
"Today the world goes very well with HTML(5) which is now the
bext markup language for document (including for inserting
embedded images that don’t require any external request”
If I had a large document that reused a particular character
thousands of times, would this HTML markup require embedding
that character thousands of times, or could I define the
character once at the beginning of the sequence, and then
refer back to it in a space efficient way?
HTML(5) allows defining *once* entities for images that can then
be reused thousands of times without repeting their definition.
You can do this as well with CSS styles, just define a class for a
small element. This element may still be an "image", but the
semantic is carried by the class you assign to it. You are not
required to provide an external source URL for that image if the
CSS style provides the content.
You may also use PUAs for the same purpose (however I have not
seen how CSS allows to style individual characters in text
elements as these characters are not elements, and there's no
defined selector for pseudo-elements matching a single character).
PUAs are perfectly usable in the situation where you have embedded
a custom font in your document for assigning glyphs to characters
(you can still do that, but I would avoid TrueType/OpenType for
this purpose, but would use the SVG font format which is valid in
CSS, for defining a collection of glyphs).
If the document is not restricted to be standalone, of course you
can use links to an external shared CSS stylesheet and to this SVG
font referenced by the stylesheet. With such approach, you don't
even need to use classes on elements, you use plain-text with very
compact PUAs (it's up to you to decide if the document must be
standalone (embedding everything it needs) or must use external
references for missing definitions, HTML allows both (and SVG as
well when it contains plain-text elements).
