Plain Text With Hyperlinks

Torbjörn Svensson Diaz · Nov 10, 2010

Hi!

Plain text is elegant but lacks hyperlinks. HTML has hyperlinks but is
bloated. Is there a middle-ground? Is there some kind of protocol that
allows you to write documents that are essentially that way plain text
is except that they have hyperlinks?

Is implementing html-documents in a minimalist fashion the closest one
gets to what I describing or has there been some obscure historical
protocol that implements what I describe but which is now no longer in use?

Best regards,

Jonathan N. Little · Nov 10, 2010

Torbjörn Svensson Diaz said:
Hi!

Plain text is elegant but lacks hyperlinks. HTML has hyperlinks but is
bloated. Is there a middle-ground? Is there some kind of protocol that
allows you to write documents that are essentially that way plain text
is except that they have hyperlinks?

Is implementing html-documents in a minimalist fashion the closest one
gets to what I describing or has there been some obscure historical
protocol that implements what I describe but which is now no longer in use?

Best regards,

If you just want basic document will no special styling HTML can be very
minimal:

<html>
<title>Should have a Title</title>
<body>

Just write your paragraphs you can leave off the optional closing tags.
You don't even need the HTML or BODY elements, but I think at least
having the opening tags to organize the document is not too burdensome.

Just use an open paragraph tag to start a new one. Just type plain text
and the only other mark-up you may need is will your hyperlink which
minimally is for example to link to <a href="http://example.com">example
..com</a>. Doesn't took too bloated to me.

Jukka K. Korpela · Nov 10, 2010

What is elegant in plain text? I can see several possible technical reasons
for using plain text, but that's not about elegance. Plain text is rude,
primitive, and inflexible. Think about an old-fashioned mechanical
typewriter or line printer: they are the technical devices that were
designed to render plain text, due to lack of better technologies.

But most of us use "plain text with hyperlinks" in a sense. When you write
an e-mail message or a Usenet posting in plain text, the recipients software
quite often interprets URLs as hyperlinks. Maybe your newsreader does that;
test: https://addons.mozilla.org/fi/firefox/addon/78/ . This is a primitive
form of linking, suitable for plain text.

If you just want basic document will no special styling HTML can be
very minimal:

<html>
<title>Should have a Title</title>
<body>

That's not minimal at all. You can reduce it to

You don't even need the HTML or BODY elements,

It's nitpicking time! An HTML document always has those elements, but their
start and end _tags_ are optional (except in XHTML).

If you want the "elegance" of plain text in the sense of having fixed
division into lines (i.e. text is not reflown according to available width
and style settings), then you can slap <pre> and </pre> around the text.
They will even make the font monospace by default. And links are still
allowed.

There are many protocols that let you include more or less link-like stuff
into more or less plain text. For example, if you start editing a Wikipedia
page, you will see an editing environment where [[foo]] is a link to
Wikipedia page about foo and [http://www.example.com An example] is a link
to an external URL.

Joy Beeson · Nov 11, 2010

If you just want basic document will no special styling HTML can be very
minimal:

<html>
<title>Should have a Title</title>
<body>

Just write your paragraphs you can leave off the optional closing tags.
You don't even need the HTML or BODY elements, but I think at least
having the opening tags to organize the document is not too burdensome.

Just use an open paragraph tag to start a new one. Just type plain text
and the only other mark-up you may need is will your hyperlink which
minimally is for example to link to <a href="http://example.com">example
.com</a>. Doesn't took too bloated to me.

| And to make the source code easier to read,
| you can set your text editor to "hanging indent"
| so that the codes are out of the way in the margin.
|
| Rumor has it that "paragraph" originally meant
| a mark in the margin: para graph, beside the writing.
|
| The last time I tried to simulate hanging indent with
| tabs, the tabs got shifted around. The |s in the margin
| were added in the hope that that wouldn't happen if
| every line begins with a character.

--
Joy Beeson
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/
The above message is a Usenet post.
I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site.

converting html to plain text	18	Apr 16, 2009
tables to plain text	8	Aug 7, 2004
parsing indented plain text	1	Jan 31, 2007
Printing plain text with exact positioning on Windows	18	Jan 4, 2010
RDoc plain text docs with command to create an HTML table?	3	Jan 29, 2009
Perl CGI returning plain text HTML code	4	Mar 23, 2007
regex for replacing plain text within html string...	2	Jan 20, 2006
Displaying text/plain as text in IE with asp.net	2	Feb 20, 2004

Plain Text With Hyperlinks

Torbjörn Svensson Diaz

Jonathan N. Little

Jukka K. Korpela

Joy Beeson

Ask a Question

Similar Threads

Members online

Forum statistics

Latest Threads