Cell content format (Re: Query: Technical description for keybindingactions?)

[Tuukka Hastrup <Tuukka.Hastrup@xxxxxx>]

On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, Andrew Pam wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 08:08:41PM -0500, Jan Theodore Galkowski wrote:
> > (2) Why can't RTF text have markup attached to it?  I'm sure
> >      you have a good reason, but I just don't see.
> Indeed it can, but unfortunately it already includes intrinsic markup
> which is what we are trying to avoid (Ted would say "prevent").  :)

One way to look into this is that RTF text has structure. And the point in 
ZigZag is its specific structure. You get problems if cell content isn't 
atomic: you can't connect content structure with structure elsewhere in 
ZigZag, and you can't use ZigZag operations when you edit content. What's 
atomic is a more difficult question and probably depends on context.

Another problem is using the same content in different situations. What if 
the structure just doesn't make sense in the new context. Or worse yet, 
what if you want to transclude a part that is not syntactically 
self-contained (regarding the inline markup)? 
Ted has published "Embedded markup considered harmful" 
(http://www.xml.com/pub/a/w3j/s3.nelson.html). Unfortunately I couldn't 
find that many public responses yet, maybe you'd like to look into these:

http://www.hypertextkitchen.com/Tools.html (the part about this)
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion/2713.html

> > (3) I want RTF because it's the gateway to arbitrary and
> >      specialized character sets, like the Asian ones and
> >      stuff like the Elvish Runes of Middle Earth as well
> >      as hieroglyphics.
> Standard Unicode text serves this purpose without introducing intrinsic
> formatting markup.

Another topic is cell content other than text: Unicode is good for all 
text, some structure around it and we have mathematical notation - but 
what about a picture, what about some sound? 

Maybe you can see that with "multimedia", considering embedded markup
harmful is more conventional. Ted's transclusions work great with these
media too (in GZigZag we have done some initial prototyping with pictures
and pdf files). These media are streams of atomic data (samples), be it in
one, two or three dimensions.  Most of us would think that of course we
have the media stream and the markup outside of it!

For references outside the scope of Ted's work, a presentation at ACM's 
Hypertext'01 by the folks at Southampton came to my mind. It was about 
serving various metadata alongside the primary media stream. 
(http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~krp/continuum/)


Regards,
Tuukka

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