Re: Cross-platform e-mail text size problems
- From: AV3 <arvimide@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 18:15:58 -0400
Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
In article <g4atm1$eh6$1@xxxxxxxx>, AV3 <arvimide@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
[...]
"Plain text" has nothing to do with character repertoires. [...]My friend Google, sending me to Wikipedia, suggests the relationship to ASCII that I referred to.
The way I read <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_text>, ASCII is mentioned mostly as historical reference. I don't see it suggest that ASCII is more "plain text" than Unicode. It says that "plain text" used to require ASCII (and never one of the 'high ascii' variants we were stuck with before Unicode) and goes on to explain how Unicode is replacing ASCII in plain text.
But I can see how the IMO too prominent placement of the 2nd and 3rd paragraph can be misleading. Would fit better under "encoding" or "history".
When Apple began implementing Unicode, only .rtf-documents could preserve formatting with diacritics beyond the range of Latin 1; .txt-documents showed gobbledegook for characters beyond the first 256 of Unicode.
Sounds like a situation where the underlying system is not Unicode. It's probably easier to take something like RTF and wrap "special characters" in it, than making the entire (file) system Unicode savvy.
In any case, this seems anecdotal. It just tells us that one implementor made use of RTF to hack some sort of Unicode support into a non-Unicode aware system.
At the risk of continuing to be anecdotal, I started using unicode in Mac OS 9 (WorldText and SUE) and jumped to Mac OS 10.1, where WorldText documents were convertible to .rtf documents. In those days ASCII meant to me ISO-8859-1, and I still encounter messages, possibly from linux environments, encoded in the old Latin designations but congruent and readable with Unicode. Messages mistakenly encoded in ISO-8859-1 instead of utf-8 are garbled.
I haven't checked since those early days, always formatting for .rtf, .doc, etc., and avoiding .txt.
...
[...]
Has plain text been upgraded without my noticing?
If you define "plain text" as "non-formatted", encoding is irrelevant.
If you define "plain text" as "lowest common denomiator", I suppose you could say that it has indeed been upgraded from ASCII to Unicode, thanks to Unicode having become ubiquitous enough to be considered a "low enough common denominator".
I communicate beyond the Mac environment, so I try to observe conventions common to all. I think "plain text" has both technical and general meanings. I think a possibly outdated technical meaning was 'ASCII,' i. e., 'Latin 1.' I think the OP meant it as 'non-formatted,' but I wanted to raise the Latin 1 question., since that remains a problem for many.
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