On Thu, 27 Sep 2007, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
Standardization is part of communications theory. If there are no common rules, then the structures are meaningless, except to the person who wrote those particular rules.
On one side you have rules of interpretation, which guide the way in which a meaning is encoded as a structure and a structure is decoded into a meaning, whereby the author has a choice and that the choice is assumed meaningful or capable of meaning;
On the other side you have rules of writing that leave no choice to the author other than whether to follow the rule or not, and in which the only meaning is whether the author respected the rules or not. Supposing that the author is required to follow the rules, there is no choice at all, so there cannot be any information within that choice.
"English" is a pretty well established standard, with lots of rules about formatting, indenting, etc.
Presuming that formatting does not include the basic semantic concepts of "a space", "a punctuation mark", "left-to-right" and "top-to-bottom", the formatting of the document is there to reinforce existing information, not to add any new one. In itself, if the "no choice" rules are followed, the formatting can be recreated from the basic formatting-less version of the text. To make the formatting essential, you'd have to remove enough critical information from the text so that the formatting becomes the only way to figure out that information, and then it wouldn't be "just" formatting anymore.
What I am advocating is more on the same level as using bold and italic to emphasise selected parts of the text. It's not the same kind of formatting, it's formatting with a choice, it's informative formatting. However I express this as special spacing, because that is the most visually effective tool for conveying that meaning; and that conflicts with the "no choice" formatting normally in use.
Is that clearer?
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