Unicode encoding philosophy

[Phake Nick]

The differences in quotation mark position among various East Asian
languages is not a sort of formatting or rich text elements. The
differences in position are not contextually meaningful, however the
marks are expected to appear in different positions in different
languages, or in the same languages but for users from different
regions. Currently, some softwares attempts to deal with this by
identifying language and region of the text being input/display, and
choosing an appropriate regional variation of the symbol position to
display to users. The variation selector will allow the variation to
be specified directly. I don't think this can be compared to italic.

William_J_G Overington via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> 於
2023年10月5日週四 上午1:57寫道：
>
> 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
>