Of course it is funny to look at a committee trying to invent some grand vision for something that was simply a small set of options available on desktops aroun

Of course it is funny to look at a committee trying to invent some grand vision for something that was simply a small set of options available on desktops around 1990. The real problem, however, is that many writing systems have never had any kind of oblique style for emphasis. Or cursive (which is a different thing). Or they have cursive, and use it all the time in print, but technically that's a different font without any connections to the main one. So any person making some kind of template should be aware that the effect of <i>-as-italic can range from “obvious thing everyone expects and understands” to “does nothing at all” depending on language and font. I think they should have got straight to that point in the article. It is pitiful how those unreflected small choices can put fences in one's mind. Everyone knows the font selection dialog in the browser, and probably thinks that the world is made of serif, sans-serif, monospace, and some Comic Sans. But that's nonsense, even for Latin. Even more pathetic is inability to use basic punctuation marks. Something as barebone as Fixedsys font had all the quotation marks and dashes since Windows 3.1, long before programs became Unicode-aware. All that time absolutely nothing has been stopping you from pressing the key and getting the proper symbol just like you type any other… except the typewriter key labels hardware makers still use, and the default system layouts being just as stale.