Re: why the plain-text format is the most useful format for eliciting beauty (and more)
I don’t see how one “elicits beauty” from something that isn’t
jim said: there.
Plain text doesn’t have enough power to encode even simple mainstream texts, which frequently include the use of italic, for example.
italics are indicated by surrounding _underscores_...
Yes, one can fake it, but then its not plain text anymore.
you have an archaic and incorrect notion of "plain text"...
If we had an unambiguous encoding which captures authors intent, then it would be easy to go the other direction and “throw away” author’s intent when it doesn’t fit into plain jane text mode.
why would you want to "throw away" the author's intent? -bowerbird
On Wed, 9 Sep 2009, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
jim said:
I don’t see how one “elicits beauty” from something that isn’t there. Plain text doesn’t have enough power to encode even simple mainstream texts, which frequently include the use of italic, for example.
italics are indicated by surrounding _underscores_...
Yes, one can fake it, but then its not plain text anymore.
you have an archaic and incorrect notion of "plain text"...
If we had an unambiguous encoding which captures authors intent, then it would be easy to go the other direction and “throw away” author’s intent when it doesn’t fit into plain jane text mode.
why would you want to "throw away" the author's intent?
-bowerbird
Most of the authors I have interviewed on this subject, perhaps all, told me they never wrote in italics, bold or underscore, that this is only a publisher artifact, nothing to do with "author's intent." Thanks!!! Michael S. Hart Founder Project Gutenberg Inventor of ebooks
why would you want to "throw away" the author's intent?
I don't want to throw away author's intent. But the reality is, in many cases DP and PG do so. Leading and following underscores are not plain text. It is an encoding to signal to the reader that something is missing -- namely italics. One could have just as well -- or as badly -- used <i> and </i> as the signals to indicate to the reader that italics is missing. I don't doubt that eventually the reader can get used to what they're missing -- but why should they have to? If it were really that hard to much more closely follow author's intent then I could understand the trade-offs. But with today's technology it really wouldn't be hard to do much better. And again, if you *want* plain text then it's easy enough to go backwards and throw away the italic information, etc.
participants (3)
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Bowerbird＠aol.com -
Jim Adcock -
Michael S. Hart