* <<G18.0901>> The street finds its own use for symbols.

* <<G18.0901>> The street finds its own use for symbols.
LET'S SHOUT SOME STUFF INTO THE JOURNAL.

THE TROUBLE WITH INTRODUCING EXPLICIT STRUCTURAL MARKER-CODES INTO
PLAIN-TEXT IS THAT WHAT YOU'D BE DOING IS PROVIDING A TOOLSET FOR
COMPOSING DOCUMENT STRUCTURE, BUT WHEN THE TOOLS ARE INADEQUATE TO
THE AUTHOR'S NEEDS, THEY'LL EITHER USE THE TOOLS IN UNINTENDED WAYS,
OR IMPROVISE THEIR OWN TOOLS. SO, THE QUESTION RAISED IS: CAN YOU
REALLY PROVIDE THE ULTIMATE TOOL SET? PROVIDING AN INADEQUATE
TOOLSET WILL ONLY MAKE MATTERS WORSE, AND PROVIDING THE PERFECT
TOOLSET MAY BE IMPOSSIBLE.

I SUGGESTED EARLIER A PARAGRAPH CODE – BUT WHAT ABOUT A STANZA
CODE? VISUALLY, THEY MAY BE SIMILAR, BUT FUNCTIONALLY THEY'RE NOT.

AND, AS I'VE NOTED MORE THAN A FEW TIMES, EMPHASIS IS A PROBLEM;
MID-SENTENCE EMPHASIS PARTICULARLY, BECAUSE EXCLAMATION POINTS SERVE
TO EMPHASIZE ENTIRE SENTENCES. KEYWORD EMPHASIS, EMPHASIS FOR
CLARIFICATION – there are a LOT of ways to *emphasize* words in
/plain-text/, all are inconsistent, and most pollute the text stream
in the same way that bracketed HTML tags or RTF codes do. In the
absence of a non-printing plain-text code for emphasis, CAPS FOR
EMPHASIS, or the now-confusing practice of Capitalization for
Emphasis (popular a few hundred years ago) are the only "clean" ways
of doing it. Everything else is bad. Yes, bad.

A hard reality to face is that, given an arbitrary set of symbols
with which to compose messages, people will find expressive uses for
all of them that don't easily conform to old categories of word and
punctuation.

--
Excerpted from:

PUBLIC NOTES (G)
http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-G
©2016 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <[email protected]>