Unicode encoding philosophy

[William_J_G Overington]

I have been reading the following.

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2023/23212-quotes-svs-proposal.pdf

I am not an expert on this at all. It looks good and I hope it becomes 
implemented.

What puzzles me though, is that structurally the proposal seems to have 
much the same encoding philosophy as a suggestion proposed by me in that 
they both would allow a variation selector to be used so as to conserve 
in plain text information that is typically these days conserved in rich 
text and gets lost if plain text is used. In my proposal, using a 
variation selector to conserve in a plain text document information 
about the use of italics in some text.

My proposal was rejected, quite strongly.

So, deep down, what please is the Unicode encoding philosophy that 
allows variation selectors to be used to conserve some information, yet 
not other information, in plain text?

William Overington

Wednesday 4 October 2023