Unicode encoding philosophy

[Kent Karlsson]

> 11 okt. 2023 kl. 02:39 skrev Erik Carvalhal Miller via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>:
> Letʼs consider an equation that youʼll probably recognize, font support
> willing: 𝐸 = 𝑚𝑐².  Thanks to the power of Unicode, we could use it
> in the same plain‐text document as, say, ℰ = 𝐦𝕔² while keeping both

That's not really a proper way of representing math expressions.
For one thing, compatibility normalisation would ruin them (true,
one is not supposed to apply that, which I agree with, but it sometimes
is anyway). Another thing is that these "mathematical" characters
were added because of letting MathML represent the (semantically,
in some sense of that word, significant) style differences would
be too verbose to express "properly" in MathML. (Still, MathML do
still not really use them, it seems.) And, without any kind of
structural coding, only very limited (and very linear) math
expressions can be given like that.
 
If you are interested in representing math expressions much more
generally in (otherwise) plain text (or in the context of ECMA-48
formatting, or even in a HTML or SVG context), I did make a proposal for that: see
https://github.com/kent-karlsson/control/blob/main/math-layout-controls-2023-B.pdf <https://github.com/kent-karlsson/control/blob/main/math-layout-controls-2023-B.pdf>.

/Kent K

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