Literals

A Mork literal is a binary octet sequence encoded as plain text. Every byte becomes literally the next byte of the value, unless certain bytes are seen which have metacharacter status. (Why is there more than one metachar? Because it might shrink markup. Complexity here is worth some compression.)

• ) - close paren - end of literal
• $ - dollar - escape the next two hex bytes which encode a single octet
• \ - backslash - if the next byte is either #xA or #xD, omit linebreak from literal; otherwise escape next byte. For example, \ removes metachar status from an immediately following \, $, or ).

The first metachar is close paren. A literal always appears at the tail end of a cell which is always terminated by a close paren ), so in practice every literal is terminated by ). The only way to get ) inside a literal is by escaping the ) byte one way or other.

The second metachar is dollar $, which allows you to encode any octet as two digits of hex. Some writers might encode all non-ascii octets this way, and the year 2000 version of Mozilla did this, but it's not required. You are never required to use $ to escape bytes when writing, but readers must escape hex following $ when $ itself is not escaped, say using \. (Why did I choose $ for this metachar? Because I thought URLs might be common Mork content, and I wanted to use a byte that might appear less often in URLs.)

The third metachar is backslash \, which was added to allow escaping metachars using C like syntax, and to allow line continuation in a C like manner so very long lines need not be generated unless a writer insists.

(If I was going to extend Mork for base 64, I'd probably extend the meaning of the $ metachar to understand a following non-hex byte was the start of a base 64 sequence. For example, ${ABC} might mean ABC was base 64 content. I've seen folks online bitch about Mozilla's verbose encoding of unicode under Mork using $ to encode every null byte. Why didn't you speak up during the year I discussed it online? In five years, why did no one tweak Mork so version 1.5 would do better? Why not just write unicode as raw binary, since Mork supports that? Why does Mork suck because no one spends an hour making changes? Whatever.)