XML has become the de facto standard for fancy text. It is therefore useful to explore ways and means of bringing XML into plain text, since obviously plain text is simpler than, and superior to, fancy text. The current method involving & and < and > and / and who knows what else is obviously much too complicated, and cannot interoperate with even the simplest plain text. Fortunately, the characters in planes 4 through B can come to our rescue.
Heh... I've occasionally caught myself almost wishing for this kind of setup, ridiculous though it be. It would be nice to be able to get just the *content* of the text without having to bother with all that mucking about with HTML rendering engines and whatnot.
I suppose only a programmer (and a semi-Luddite one at that, who won't or can't use existing packages) would really care, though.
Now, if we can just simplify ASCII down to *one* character and some variation selectors...
~mark
