Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Doug Ewell]

Marcel Schneider wrote:

> According to my hypothesis and while waiting, I believe that
> the intent of the gap kept in the superscript lowercase range,
> is to maintain a limitation to the performance of plain text.
> I don't see very well how to apply Hanlon's razor here, because
> there seems to be a strong unwillingness to see people getting
> keyboards that allow them to write in plain text without being
> bound to high-end software. The goal seems to be to keep the users
> dependent on a special formatting feature and to draw them away
> from simplicity.

Hanlon's Razor doesn't apply here, because it's not a dichotomy between
malice and stupidity.

Unicode has a particular definition of what constitutes "plain text,"
and it's become evident over the past 25 years that some people have
different definitions. That's probably never going to change (I
personally don't believe the difference between black-and-white pictures
of cows and color pictures of cows is a plain-text distinction), but the
Unicode definition is really the one that matters in discussions like
this.

What doesn't help, IMHO, is to claim that UTC has some ulterior motive
to restrict the applicability of plain text and manipulate users and
"draw them away from simplicity." I think insinuations of evil intent
need to be better-founded than that.
 
 
--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org