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Rich Text, Poor Text (2013)
Author: Adam Moore (LÆMEUR) <adam@laemeur.com> Date: February 9, 2013 Revisited: January 17, 2014 Rich Text, Poor Text Bold, italic, subscript, superscript, underlines, strike-throughs — I don't find any of these presentational attributes of text any more frivolous than quotation marks and exclamation points. I mean, really, if the goal was to be starkly minimalistic about it, we could write prose for electronic transmission with letters, spaces and line-breaks, and throw-out all the explicit markup.
My further objection to using embedded markup for these presentational attributes is that by omitting them from the character coding scheme, they are denied as elements of language and, to use some Nelsonian terminology, they are treated as packaging rather than content. Unicode has since strayed from its aim of "fixed one-to-one correspondence with characters of the world's writing systems" by supporting multiple-character combinations to add diacritical marks to a glyph — not at all dissimilar from the method of ANSI escape-sequences — yet still it has no standardized coding for ubiquitous, pan-lingual presentational conventions such as bold text. While I think conflating "markup" and "punctuation" was a step too far, particularly in light of the fact that the former term has accrued considerable connotative baggage in the last ~20 years, I do think it's worth investigating the boundaries of orthography (or graphology?)
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