> It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text, given the inevitable connection to its function in linking to other documents,

> It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text, given the inevitable connection to its function in linking to other documents, and thus its coexistence with markup for links. Furthermore, the existing widespread practice of representing this sign on web pages using images (often specified via CSS styles) would be unlikely to benefit from attempting to encode a character for this image. I don't really have a horse in this race, but... isn't the existing widespread practice of representing the sign using images attributable to the fact there is not a character available? What else do they want people to do? The point of adding the character is so that in the future people can use text instead of an image.