[460] in Zephyr_Comments
Re: Formatting commands
eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Sun May 27 02:30:04 1990
1) I didn't choose Scribe(tm) formatting; I implemented that based on the
*design*. The idea was that Scribe(tm) and Shell Scripts were concepts that the
users were already familiar with (ie. had already invested in training for) and
thus could reuse some previous experience when writing descriptions.
2) Zephyr should get "information" from one user to another. [note that I
tend to express varying emphasis moderately well merely using ASCII...] The
use of @bold, etc. are more a lack of _convention_ or _language_ that is
sufficient to express information in text. As for system messages, the content
of such messages is so limited that the formatting decisions should be left
entirely up to the reader.
The formatting was *NEVER* intended as sender markup language! It was an
interim solution to the problem of describing how the *READER* wanted to see
the messages (interim because we eventually wanted a graphic design tool for
message layout, an idea which seems to have been lost...)
3) Accents: gee, it would be neat if some thought was put into multi-locale
support in the Athena environment... but that isn't a Zephyr issue, that's an
Athena-wide problem.
