Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

[Andrew West via Unicode]

On Sun, 20 Jan 2019 at 03:16, James Kass via Unicode
<unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
>
> Possible approaches include:
>
> 3 - Open/Close punctuation treatment
> Stateful.  Works on ranges.  Not currently supported in plain-text.
> Could be supported in applications which can take a text string URL and
> make it a clickable link.  Default appearance in nonsupporting apps may
> resemble existing plain-text italic kludges such as slashes.  The ASCII
> is already in the character string.

A possibility that I don't think has been mentioned so far would be to
use the existing tag characters (E0020..E007F). These are no longer
deprecated, and as they are used in emoji flag tag sequences, software
already needs to support them, and they should just be ignored by
software that does not support them. The advantages are that no new
characters need to be encoded, and they are flexible so that tag
sequences for start/end of italic, bold, fraktur, double-struck,
script, sans-serif styles could be defined. For example start and end
of italic styling could be defined as the tag sequences <i> and </i>
(E003C E0069 E003E and E003C E002F E0069 E003E).

Andrew