Encoding italic

[Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode]

On 1/17/19 1:27 AM, Martin J. Dürst via Unicode wrote:
>
> This lead to the layering we have now: Case distinctions at the
> character level, but style distinctions at the rich text level. Any good
> technology has layers, and it makes a lot of sense to keep established
> layers unless some serious problem is discovered. The fact that Twitter
> (currently) doesn't allow styled text and that there is a small number
> of people who (mis)use Math alphabets for writing italics,... on Twitter
> doesn't look like a serious problem to me.
How small a number?  How big?  I don't know either.  To mention Second 
Life again, which is pretty strongly defensible as a plain-text 
environment (with some exceptions, as for hyperlinks), I note that the 
viewers for it (and the servers?) don't seem to support Unicode 
characters outside of the BMP.  Which leads the flip-side of the "gappy" 
mathematical alphabets: you can say SOME things in italic or fraktur or 
double-struck... but only if they have the correct few letters that 
happen to be in the BMP already. Obviously, this can and should be 
blamed on incomplete Unicode support by the software vendors, but it 
still matters in the same way that "incomplete" markup support (i.e. 
none) matters to Twitter users: people make do with what they have, and 
will (mis)use even the few characters they can, though that leads to odd 
situations (see earlier list of display names.)

~mark