I feel that deprecating the tag characters within Unicode was a mistake.
There was once a public consultation and the tag characters were not deprecated.
Some time later I read that the tag characters had been deprecated.
I did not know of that possibility before the meeting that made the decision
took place. Whether that was because I missed noticing a public announcement or
whether it was that, not representing an organization, I could not have known,
I do not at present know.
The rise of Twitter, using plain text, means that tag characters could have
been of enormous benefit in communications.
Tag characters were, at the time of deprecation, only used for language
tagging. Had things been different, more tag control characters could have been
defined so as to help with such things as library cataloguing.
A great facility, for which one needs good application facilities above plane
0, was deprecated when good application facilities above plane 0 were less than
they are today, and there is still more to do in having good application
facilities above plane 0.
I feel that tag characters should be restored, maybe not as if deprecation had
never happened, yet in some meaningful, useful way.
I do not understand why the Unicode Consortium seems so keen to move to using
markup facilites and so against using a stream of plain text characters.
William Overington
8 November 2010
