[HN Gopher] Rich Text, Poor Text (2013)
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Rich Text, Poor Text (2013)
Author : SerCe
Score : 35 points
Date : 2025-04-02 23:15 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (laemeur.sdf.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (laemeur.sdf.org)
| tinthedev wrote:
| Hah, I was about to criticise the text for far too lightly
| conflating markup and punctuation, just to see the afterword.
|
| I actually do think the author has a point, in that must
| solutions today are inelegant, I also don't think this is a
| problem which has a real elegant solution. Where to draw the
| line? Why not encode fonts into the standard too, if we're doing
| bold? Etc.
|
| I'm still mostly in favour of keeping everything markdown (in my
| own writing), however much it pollutes the "purity" of text.
| hello_computer wrote:
| This person is confused. He's citing a Ted Nelson paper about
| separating these things into layers (content, structure, &
| special effects), while personally advocating that we mash it all
| into unicode.
|
| https://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.nelson.html
| AlienRobot wrote:
| People are limited by their tools.
|
| The author believes that plain text should encode bold, italic,
| etc., because that's all they had exposure to. Were the text
| written today, they would claim emojis belong in unicode as well.
|
| Most social media don't support it, but on Tumblr, for example,
| you can specify the color of the text and even choose a different
| font. I think there was some other social media that allowed you
| to have animated effects on the text as well, but I forgot the
| name.
| tomxor wrote:
| > Were the text written today, they would claim emojis belong
| in unicode as well.
|
| Not sure what you mean, unicode does contain emojis. That's
| what most platform use for emojis now,
| nextos wrote:
| Yes, Unicode even defines characters for subindex and
| superindex. It's quite capable for basic inline math
| equations.
| timeflex wrote:
| Sad what things like Markdown has done to people. It's like they
| forgot about all the amazing semantic markup of HTML 5 to create
| strong relations between their data. I'll take a Lexical editor
| with SQLite to store my data any day.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I don't think it's that so much as that all that extra context
| is overkill in lots of situations. If I'm writing a blog post
| or a Slack message or my own internal-use note, I probably just
| want some lightweight formatting. Making rich semantic
| connections wouldn't have a good payoff for the extra work in
| those cases.
| II2II wrote:
| You pretty much need to use markup (or control codes) for rich
| text. Take bold, italic, underline, strikeout: those four can,
| and are, used in nearly any combination. You would need one bit
| for each of them. You would need two bits to specify four levels
| of headings. If you don't allow for that, you are back to using
| markup. You would also need one bit to specify proportional/fixed
| width font, because that is a thing too. That remaining bit would
| have to be used for superscript, since superscripts are commonly
| used for footnotes and simple mathematical expressions.
|
| Okay, you can now create passable rich text documents for a
| limited (though common) range of purposes with that 8/24-bit
| breakdown that was suggested. But you may have noticed the author
| mentioned subscripts, which wasn't in my list. Well, it turns out
| that subscript and superscript have a terribly limited range of
| applications if you are specifying them per character: x^2^2
| would be visually identical to x^22, and x^a_b would look
| different from x_b^a (with both presentations being nonsensical).
| The use of subscripts and superscripts in any technical
| applications would be severely limited. You need a much richer
| markup language to be truly expressive. So there really isn't
| much of a point in offering subscripts. Superscripts, sure,
| because they have a few non-technical uses.
|
| Yet the reality is that people want a much richer set of
| formatting options. At a minimum, they want to select fonts and
| font sizes. Some of the formatting options have semantics. I know
| I crammed four levels of headings in those eight bits, but that
| only makes sense in headings. It doesn't make sense to specify it
| per character. Then there are other common document elements,
| like tables. You can create decent tables using monospaced fonts,
| but that is limiting and would produce undesirable results in
| some cases (try displaying April 5^th sensibly, using a monospace
| font so that it won't affect the width of the columns). On top of
| that, you are ditching the concept of styles because that implies
| some sort of markup.
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