--On Tuesday, July 07, 2009 14:12 -0700 Tim Bray
<tbray(_at_)textuality(_dot_)com> wrote:
...
We draw some comfort from
the facts that it does not have to be interpreted by programs
for display,
I really hope you didn't mean what that sentence apparently
says. No file may be displayed without the invention of one or
more computer programs. I think that what you're saying is
that IETF legacy plain-text displays correctly in a terminal
emulator (and incorrectly in a browser). This is clearly
correct but many of us feel that correct display in a browser
is of higher utility to a greater number of potential spec
users.
With the understanding that I'm not a heavy Linux or Unix user
on client machines but in the hope that the community will
understand the reference, let me restate the comment as follows:
If I start with a plain-ASCII string with line boundaries in it
if needed, I can get it plausibly (although perhaps not
optimally) rendered by piping it to the user's display
terminal, e.g., with
cat(string)
or
printf(string)
Those functions, in addition to being extremely simple, tend to
be basic functions of operating systems or APIs to those basic
functions.
By contrast, sensible rendering of, e.g., HTML, requires that I
recognize the material as HTML and have a sufficient HTML
interpreter to distinguish between what is to be displayed and
what are instructions and perhaps what to do with those
instructions. That seems to me to be a significant and
substantive difference. YMMD.
john
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