From: Julian Bradfield (jcb+unicode@inf.ed.ac.uk)
Date: Wed Apr 13 2011 - 10:53:18 CDT
Hans Aberg <haberg-1@telia.com> wrote:
>On 13 Apr 2011, at 16:42, Julian Bradfield wrote:
>So do you want to add every math style used now and in the future, in
>effect, every font ever used, as a new semantic style in Unicode?
Certainly not. The maths alphabets should never have been added in the
first place. And since they don't make the distinctions that
mathematicians do, they're not even useful for their intended purpose.
(If you do a little Googling, you'll see that people are already
complaining about Unicode's failure to distinguish \mathcal from \mathscr,
for the purpose of using "plain text" in translating MathML. If the
maths alphabets hadn't been added, they wouldn't be trying to do such
a daft thing in the first place.)
Just as, to get back to the point, the playing cards should never have
been added.
Perhaps one might sum up as: if you propose adding something to
Unicode, and your addition naturally and immediately leads to an
unbounded list of further additions, you should not pass GO.
(Also, of course, actual evidence of plain text use should be
required, but that seems a lost cause.)
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