Richard Wordingham responded to Janusz S. Bień,
>> ... Nobody ever claimed that reproducing all variations
>> in manuscripts is in scope of Unicode, so whom do you want
>> to convince that it is not?
>
> I think the counter-claim is that one will never be able
> to encode all the meaning-conveying distinctions of text
> in Unicode.
I think that the general agreement is that Unicode plain text isn't
intended for preserving stylistic differences. The dilemma is that
opinions differ as to what constitutes a stylistic difference.
If there had been an "International Typewriter Usage Consortium" a
hundred years ago which had issued an edict like "the underscore is
placed on the keyboard for the explicit purpose of typing empty lines
for 'fill-in-the-blank' forms, and must never be used by the typist to
underline any other element of type", then that consortium would have
been dictating how users perceive their own written symbols along with
preventing users from establishing new conventions using existing
symbols, experimenting, or innovating.
Some people consider that Unicode is essentially doing the same kind of
thing. It's *that* perception which needs to be addressed, perhaps with
FAQs and education, or with some kind of revisiting and rethinking. Or
both.
