<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr">On Mon, Dec 14, 2020 at 10:54 PM Rebecca Bettencourt via Unicode <<a href="mailto:unicode@unicode.org">unicode@unicode.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr">Many character sets from 8-bit microcomputers had “inverse†or “reverse video†characters that were treated as distinct from their “normal video†counterparts. When we proposed encoding these, as atomic characters or using variation sequences or by any other means, the UTC shot down the idea completely.<br></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Early computing systems conflated layers of processing where modern ones separate them. For example, a quarter of ASCII and of EBCDIC, respectively, was used for control codes which we inherited but which are now mostly unused because we use lower-level mechanisms instead that carry text purely as payload.</div><div><br></div><div>I think the plain text / rich text distinction has been quite successful. I don't actually personally like the math-styled characters because they seem specific to a particular math tradition. When I was in high school, the vector-math teacher gave us a choice between the old style of using Fraktur/Sütterlin for vector variables vs. the new style of regular letters with an arrow on top. "Vector" markup with different style choices seems better for this kind of thing.</div><div><br></div><div>markus</div></div></div>