Italics get used to express important semantic meaning, so unicode should support them

[David Starner]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2020 at 4:47 PM Sławomir Osipiuk via Unicode
<unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> "Implementations of Unicode that already make use of out-of-band
> mechanisms for language [or format] tagging or “heavy-weight” in-band
> mechanisms such as XML or HTML will continue to do exactly what they
> are doing and will ignore the tag characters completely. They may even
> prohibit their use to prevent conflicts with the equivalent markup."

So every single thing that interfaces with HTML now has to handle
Unicode italics on any plain text input, or silently dump them into
the stream, and the web browser may have to handle them or not.

> It's meant for preservation, not decoration.

I've done preservation, and don't see how this helps at all. You can
go with various preservation file formats, like TEI Lite, or various
more directly readable file formats like HTML or PDF. None of those
has any problem handling italics. Plain text willfully drops many
details, so probably isn't a realistic choice for preservation.

-- 
The standard is written in English . If you have trouble understanding
a particular section, read it again and again and again . . . Sit up
straight. Eat your vegetables. Do not mumble. -- _Pascal_, ISO 7185
(1991)