From: James G. S. (jim) <jg...@sa...> - 2008-04-09 06:10:37
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I've cut all the quotes because I just want to make a general comment, and report what I gathered at the end. Not that my summary is complete, best, or final, of course. Others may certainly wish to reply. ==> I think this thread has been a great exchange. I thought Jason made an excellent point that if presentation or even layout is more than just a little important, then it may be not be best practice to try to transcribe it into a note -- it would be worth considering referencing it as a source in a better (media) format. Benny's example and Doug's appeal not to make simple conveniences difficult lead me to believe that support for simple tabular data would be a shame to forgo. Brian's reminder to be sensitive to archival disadvantages of proprietary formats is well taken. Maybe there's a future for additional extensions dealing with this issue. Maybe such tools can usefully extend the level of complexity, and let users decide. The use of _future_ and _extension_ would be key, I suppose. (Ok this is not a recap -- sorry). I also liked Jason's afterthought that respect for good old fashioned ASCII text should maybe be replaced with respect for plain text. I think we can drop the "ASCII" modfier and still adequately emphasize the text benefits without snubbing languages for which the 95 ASCII characters are inadequate. I especially liked Doug's remark hoping that we can find the right balance -- that, after all, is the right recipe in many cases, is it not? Cheers to all, ..jim |