I can well imagine people deeply interested in chess, to want to exchange chess board layouts in plain text emails (or at least not use quite hard-to-handle HTML code), and even parse them (programmatically) for analysis by a program, not wanting to bother with quite complex HTML/CSS stuff. Including making input easy (keyboard, palette), just "typing" the chess board layout (with pieces).
But for HTML pages on chess, HTML/CSS markup is certainly preferable; but it shouldn't be impossible to just paste in a "plain text" chess board to an HTML page (with minimal formatting effort). One can (fairly easily) make a program to convert the "plain text" chess board to an HTML one. Book formatting? Old style book formatting still cannot use as sophisticated layouts as HTML can... (AFAIK). /Kent K Den 2017-04-03 23:44, skrev "markus....@gmail.com" <markus....@gmail.com>: > On Mon, Apr 3, 2017 at 2:33 PM, Michael Everson <ever...@evertype.com> wrote: >> On 3 Apr 2017, at 18:51, Markus Scherer <markus....@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> It seems to me that higher-level layout (e.g, HTML+CSS) is appropriate for >>> the board layout (e.g., via a table), board frame style, and cell/field >>> shading. In each field, the existing characters should suffice. >> >> That isn¹t plain text. > > A lot of stuff needed for printing books and laying out PDFs and web pages > goes beyond plain text. > > Whose requirement is it to represent an entire chess or checkers board in > plain text? > > Other than a sort of puzzle of "what would it take to do so?" > > markus >
