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

[David Starner]

On Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 4:54 PM Kent Karlsson via Unicode
<unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> On 12/15/2020 8:19 PM, David Starner via Unicode wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> Let me paraphrase:
>
> ”So every single thing that interfaces with HTML now has to handle RTF italics on any plain text input,
> or silently dump them into the stream, and the web browser may have to handle them or not.”
>
> You would not use that as an argument to say that RTF (which I picked just because it is well-known)
> should be wiped from the face of Earth? I would think not… (You may want to wipe RTF from the face
> of the Earth, I don’t know, but you would not use that argument even if you do want that.)

I wouldn't use that argument because it makes no sense. RTF and HTML
are at the same level. Plain text (and Unicode specifically, for HTML)
are at a lower, underlying level. If you want to make another rich
text format, it's no skin off my nose. It is completely off-topic on
this list, though. This list is about Unicode and changes thereto.

>  Similarly for any ”plain text” (”low level”, really)
> formatting proposal other than ECMA-48.

Exactly. They're not "plain text". So why are low-level formatting
proposals relevant to this list at all? ECMA-48 is not plain text.

-- 
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)