Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Steve Swales]

> On Oct 3, 2016, at 10:14 AM, Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:
> 
> a.lukyanov wrote:
> 
>> I think that the right thing to do would be to create several new
>> control/formatting characters, like this:
>> 
>> "previous character is superscript"
>> "previous character is subscript"
>> "previous character is small caps (for use in phonetic transcription
>> only)"
>> "previous character is mathematical blackletter"
>> etc
>> 
>> Then people will be able to apply this features on any character as
>> long as their font supports it.
> 
> I happen to think this would be exactly the wrong thing to do,
> completely contrary to the principles of plain text that Unicode was
> founded upon. But you never know what might gain traction, so stay
> tuned.

I guess I don’t see how it is fundamentally different from other variant selector uses within Unicode, and the ability to write properly formatted mathematical and chemical formulas (for example) in a plain text environment like text messaging seems like a fairly compelling use case.

-steve