Encoding italic

[James Kass via Unicode]

Philippe Verdy responded to William Overington,

 > the proposal would contradict the goals of variation selectors and would
 > pollute ther variation sequences registry (possibly even creating 
conflicts).
 > And if we admit it for italics, than another VSn will be dedicated to 
bold,
 > and another for monospace, and finally many would follow for various
 > style modifiers.
 > Finally we would no longer have enough variation selectors for all 
requests).

There are 256 variation selector characters.  Any use of variation 
sequences not registered by Unicode would be non-conformant.

William’s suggestion of floating a proposal for handling italics with 
VS14 might be an example of the old saying about “putting the cart 
before the horse”.  Any preliminary proposal would first have to clear 
the hurdle of the propriety of handling italic information at the 
plain-text level.  Such a proposal might list various approaches for 
accomplishing that, if that hurdle can be surmounted.