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Which protocol or open standard do you like or wish was more popular? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.

The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.

I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

What about people who prefer to type **bold** rather than type a word, highlight it, and find the Bold option in whichever textbox editor they happen to be using?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Which is what i ask for, better (or at all) support for unicode character variations, including soft keyboards.
Imagine, there was a switch for bold, cursive, etc on your phone keyboard, why would you want to type markup?
And nobody would take **bold** away, if you want to write that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I don't like that approach. Text search won't find all the different possible Unicode representations.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You always find some excuses, huh? That would be a bug.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Always? That's my first reply. Bug of what? A flaired character has a different code than a standard one, so your files would be incompatible with any established tools like find or grep.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

My bad, confused you with someone else.

You can always update them.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Would you have to do that for every letter? I suppose a "bold-on/bold-off" character combination would be better/easier, and then you could combine multiple styles without multiplying the number of glyphs by some ridiculous number.

Anyways, because markup is already standardized, mostly. Having both unicode and markup would be a nightmare. More complicated markup (bulleted lists, tables) is simpler than it would be in Unicode. And markup is outside of Unicode's intended purpose, which is to have a collection of every glyph. Styling is separate from glyphs, and has been for a long time, for good reason. Fonts, bold/italics/underline/strikethrough, color, tables and lists, headings, font size, etc. are simply not something Unicode is designed to handle.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Would you have to do that for every letter? I suppose a "bold-on/bold-off" character combination would be better/easier,

Yeah, had the same thought, edited already.