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Comment by AlienRobot

13 days ago

People are limited by their tools.

The author believes that plain text should encode bold, italic, etc., because that's all they had exposure to. Were the text written today, they would claim emojis belong in unicode as well.

Most social media don't support it, but on Tumblr, for example, you can specify the color of the text and even choose a different font. I think there was some other social media that allowed you to have animated effects on the text as well, but I forgot the name.

7 comments

AlienRobot

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tomxor  13 days ago

> Were the text written today, they would claim emojis belong in unicode as well.

Not sure what you mean, unicode does contain emojis. That's what most platform use for emojis now,

  • AlienRobot  13 days ago

    But should it contain emoji? I can copy and paste bold text from one rich text editor to another just fine. Why not use XML to encode emoji?

    • rhet0rica  13 days ago

      <emoticon type="graphical" value="PILE OF POO" entity="&x1F4A9;" fallback="" fallback-encoding="utf-8" />

  • nextos  13 days ago

    Yes, Unicode even defines characters for subindex and superindex. It's quite capable for basic inline math equations.

    • wruza  12 days ago

      Which adds complexity and solves nothing. We'd better have a standard markup (we already have) than this half-assed wannabe-markup that is so complex and a minefield that modern forums tend to filter it anyway. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_super... – The wikipedia article about unicode sub/superscripts can't even render half of these symbols on neither of my {ios,windows,android} devices. In theory we have it, in practice it's dead baggage.