A last missing link for interoperable representation

[James Kass via Unicode]

Marcel Schneider wrote,

 > With rich text we need to stay in rich text, whereas the goal of
 > this thread is to point ways of ensuring interoperability.

Both interoperability and legibility are factors.  The question might 
be:  How legible should Unicode be for Latin—barely legible, moderately 
legible, or extremely legible?

The boundaries of plain text have advanced since the concept originated 
and will probably continue to do so.  Stress can currently be 
represented in plain text with conventions used in lieu of existing 
typographic practice.  Unicode can preserve texts created using the 
plain text kludges/conventions for marking stress, but cannot preserve 
printed texts which use standard publishing conventions for marking 
stress, such as italics.

If Latin were a dead script being proposed for encoding now, it’s 
possible that certain script features currently considered to be merely 
stylistic variants best reserved for mark-up would be encoded atomically.

Scripts added more recently to Unicode appear to have been encoded with 
the idea of preserving the standard writing and publishing conventions 
of the users.  It's only natural if some Latin script users want to push 
back the boundaries of Latin computer plain text accordingly.