ISO deprecates ASCII Horizontal Tab control character

[fsb at thefsb.org]

The subcommittee of ISO Joint Technical Committee 1 that is responsible for coded character sets has deprecated the Horizontal Tab control character in an approved revision of ISO/IEC 646 to be published in the next few months.

"The days of HT's usefulness in printer control are long gone," said Dr. Yishoki Makimi, chair of the subcommittee. "Today tabs are only used in software source code. Our research revealed they serve no function in software engineering other than to provoke arguments and therefore waste time. We measured that HTs accumulated economic cost surpassed that of big vs. little-endian byte order in 2007 and started the committee work to deprecate it shortly after that."

The width of a horizontal tab was originally adjustable in printer mechanism and was never standardized. Its subsequent use for indentation of instructions in the source code of block-oriented languages was economical when computer storage was expensive. Eventually many programmers adopted spaces leading to the contraversy that motivated the subcommittee.

Microsoft has responded to ISO's move by announcing that HT will contunue be supported in Windows through Version 8, after which the code point will be repurposed for the Windows Key. Hillary Jeremy, Microsoft's code quality and standards boss, welcomed the move saying, "We've probably spent more time, over the years, fighting over tabs than we have spent fixing bugs in Office."