Walter van Holst wrote:
Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
p.g. introduces its own linebreaks into its plain-ascii e-texts, all without ever entering the markup arena.
and i put in my own line-breaks, right here in these posts to this listserve, again without using any markup at all, just the return key.
Line-breaks are mark-up. They don't add anything whatsoever to the text itself and are completely arbitrarily decided, usually based on the technology that is used to display the actual content. You can deny the difference between structure, content and presentation all you want, but it is perfectly possible to reformat a book using columns instead of lines without changing the actual content. And where will your precious line-breaks go in that case?
Yes, line-breaks (CR/LF, etc.) are markup. They are text characters used to communicate something besides the content. Paper books don't need to include these characters (they'd be invisible anyway), thus they are characters not part of the content, i.e. markup. Also, using * and _ for highlighting purposes is also markup. Of course, what Bowerbird means by markup is formalized and comprehensive text markup systems such as TeX, SGML/XML, troff, etc., but then his ZML system is another markup system that has kept markup characters to a minimum. This brings up an interesting observation in that using line-breaks in plain text has variable importance, from mildly important (arbitrarily used in paragraphs simply to trim line lengths to something manageable), to quite important (preserving poetry lines, and as Bowerbird would attest, everything he writes even if when prose-like in meaning.) The problem is knowing the relative importance of line-breaks in a plain text document, especially if one does not understand the language to ascertain context. ZML tries to tackle this issue, and I think somewhat succeeds, albeit at a loss of richness like the Model T Ford and black paint. And as noted previously, *how* does one know a particular plain text is ZML and thus falls under strict and unambiguous plain text formatting rules? Jon Noring