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There’s a reason that killer apps in the 80s were rich text editors: aesthetics and layout matter. Having said that, there’s definitely environments (shells an

by rtpg 3y ago

There’s a reason that killer apps in the 80s were rich text editors: aesthetics and layout matter. Having said that, there’s definitely environments (shells and the like) where you want different behavior. Though even there it’s tricky: emoji being Unicode and a lack of random rules means that emoji “just work” everywhere. Other normalization rules might wreak havoc in certain languages people don’t know about. ASCII only for talking to the computer is a bit of an outdated concept at this point

cultureswitch 3y ago
> ASCII only for talking to the computer is a bit of an outdated concept at this point It's not. The mapping between ASCII and keyboard keys is clear. Wherever unambiguous English text is required (for example programming and documentation), ASCII is still the best. Each person may want to use renderers that will do fancy things, and that's fine because it's on the render side. The issue with Unicode is that it's a messy mix of presentation and data. ASCII isn't. So whenever you create a Unicode document, you are unintentionally embedding presentation information into it, and it's not the case with ASCII.