I’m reminded of the design for XML itself, it is supposed to start
with a header that defines what that XML will conform to. Those
definitions contain some unique identifiers of that XML schema, which
happens to be a URL. The URL is partly just a convenient unique
identifier, but also, the XML engine, if it doesn’t know about that
schema could go to that URL and download the schema, and check that
the XML conforms to that schema.
Similarly, imagine a text format that had a header with something like:
\uCHARSET:facebook.com/charsets/pusheen-the-cat-emoji/,12345
Now all the characters following in the text will interpret characters
that start with 12345 with respect to that character set. What would
you find at at facebook.com/charsets/pusheen-the-cat-emoji/? You might
find bitmaps, truetype fonts, vector graphics, etc. You might find
many many representations of that character set that your rendering
engine could cache for future use. The text format wouldn’t be reliant
on today’s favorite rendering technology, whether bitmap, truetype
fonts, or whatever. Right now, if you go to a website that references
unicode that your platform doesn’t know about, you see nothing. If a
format like this existed, character sets would be infinitely
extensible, everybody on earth could see characters, even if their
platform wasn’t previously aware of them, and the format would be
independent of today’s rendering technologies. Let’s face it, HTML5
changes every few years, and I don’t think anybody wants the
fundamental textual representation dependant on an entire layout
engine. And also the whole range of what HTML5 can do, even some
subset, is too much information. You don’t necessarily want your text
to embed the actual character set. Perhaps that might be a useful
option, but I think most people would want to uniquely identify the
character set, in a way that an engine can download it, but without
defining the actual details itself. Of course, certain charsets would
probably become pervasive enough that platforms would just include
them for convenience. Emojis by major messaging platforms. Maybe
characters related to specialised domains like, I don’t know, mapping
or specialised work domains or whatever, But without having to be
subservient to the central unicode committee.
As someone who is a keen user of Facebook messenger, and who sees them
bring out a new set of emoji almost every week, I think the world will
soon be totally bored with the plain basic emoji that unicode has defined.
—
Chris
On Sun, May 31, 2015 at 9:06 PM, Asmus Freytag (t)
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>, wrote:
2015-05-29 4:37 GMT+02:00 John <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>>:
"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).
