On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 2:09 AM Tex via Unicode <[email protected]> wrote: > The arguments against italics seem to be: > > · Unicode is plain text. Italics is rich text. > > · We haven't had it until now, so we don't need it. > > · There are many rich text solutions, such as html. > > · There are ways to indicate or simulate italics in plain text > including using underscore or other characters, using characters that look > italic (eg math), etc. > > · Adding Italicization might break existing software > > · The examples of existing Unicode characters that seem to represent > rich text (emoji, interlinear annotation, et al) have justifications.
There generally shouldn't be multiple ways of doing things. For example, if you think that searching for certain text in italics is important, then having both HTML italics and Unicode italics are going to cause searches to fail or succeed unexpectedly, unless the underlying software unifies the two systems (an extra complexity). Searching for certain italicized text could be done today in rich text applications, were there actual demand for it. > · Plain text still has tremendous utility and rich text is not always > an option. Where? Twitter has the option of doing rich text, as does any closed system. In fact, Twitter is rich text, in that it hyperlinks web addresses. That Twitter has chosen not to support italics is a choice. If users don't like this, they could go another system, or use third-party tools to transmit rich text over Twitter. The use of underscores or <i> </i> markings for italics would be mostly compatible with human twitterers using the normal interface. Source code is an example of plain text, and yet adding italics into comments would require but a trivial change to editors. If the user audience cared, it would have been done. In fact, I suspect there exist editors and environments where an HTML subset is put into comments and rendered by the editors; certainly active links would be more useful in source code comments than italics. Lastly, the places where I still find massive use of plain text are the places this would hurt the most. GNU Grep's manpage shows no sign that it supports searching under any form of Unicode normalization. Same with GNU Less. Adding italics would just make searching plain text documents more complex for their users. The domain name system would just add them to the ban list, and they'd be used for spoofing in filenames and other less controlled but still sensitive environments. -- Kie ekzistas vivo, ekzistas espero.
