27 Nov
2018
27 Nov
'18
7:45 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Grant Taylor via cctalk once stated:
On 11/27/2018 04:43 PM, Keelan Lightfoot via cctalk
wrote:
[ snip ]
Unpopular opinion time: Markup languages are a kludge, relying on plain
text to describe higher level concepts.
I agree that markup languages are a kludge. But I don't know that they
require plain text to describe higher level concepts.
I see no reason that we can't have new control codes to convey new
concepts if they are needed.
Aside: ASCII did what it needed to do at the time. Times are different
now. We may need more / new / different control codes.
By control codes, I'm meaning a specific binary sequence that means a
specific thing. I think it needs to be standardized to be compatible
with other things -or- it needs to be considered local and proprietary
to an application. I don't think of bold or italic or underline as
second class concepts.
I tend to think of the following attributes that can be applied to text:
? bold
? italic
? overline
? strike through
? underline
? superscript exclusive or subscript
? uppercase exclusive or lowercase
? opposing case
? normal (none of the above)
But there are defined control codes for that (or most of that list
anyway). It's not ANSI, but an ISO standard. Let's see ...
^[[1m bold
^[[3m italic
^[[53m overline
^[[9m strike through
^[[4m underline
^[[0m normal
The superscript/subscribe could be done via another font
^[[11m ... ^[[19m
Maybe even the opposing case case ... um ... yeah.
By the way, ^[ is a single character representing the ASCII ESC character
(27).
I see no reason that the keyboard can't have keys
/ glyphs added to it.
I'm personally contemplating adding additional keys (via an add on
keyboard) that are programmed to produce additional symbols. I
frequently use the following symbols and wish I had keys for easier
access to them: ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?,
?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ?.
Years ago I came across an IBM Model M keyboard that had the APL character
set on the keyboard, along with the normal characters one finds. I would
have bought it on the spot if it weren't for a friend of mine who saw it 10
seconds before I did.
I did recently get another IBM Model M keyboard (an SSK model) that had
additional labels on the keys:
http://boston.conman.org/2018/10/31.2
The nice thing about the IBM Model M is the keycaps are easy to replace.
I will concede that many computers and / or
programming languages do
behave based on text. But I am fairly confident that there are some
programming languages (I don't know about computers) that work
differently. Specifically, simple objects are included as part of the
language and then more complex objects are built using the simpler
objects. Dia and (what I understand of) Minecraft come to mind.
You might be thinking of Smalltalk.
-spc