Tim Bray wrote:
On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 6:27 AM, Melinda Shore<melinda.shore@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Right now ascii text is probably the most widely-supported
display format.
This statement is violently counter-intuitive and shouldn't be
accepted unsupported by evidence.
- ASCII is not usable for the languages of a large majority of the
world's population.
- For electronic consumption of texts longer than SMS messages, HTML
is the most widely-used display format, probably followed by PDF.
- For print consumption, the use of modern typographic techniques -
real quotation marks, dashes, accented characters if only for usages
like café and coöperate - is generally seen as required, so ASCII is
very seldom used.
ASCII-only is a primitive leftover from the
typographically-impoverished dawn of computing. Can we get over it
already?
You're heading into new territory, here. Right now
IETF documents are written in English and they're
displayable on a wider variety of hardware than HTML
is. As I mentioned in the mail to which you're responding,
I think the choice of formats tends to support more
openness and accessibility. I think you're implicitly
arguing that that's not the right tradeoff, and frankly
I think it's exactly the right tradeoff, myself.
Melinda
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