That is not of Unicode's concern. Markup is reserved for higher-level things and is not done within Unicode. Well, I’m not sure what authority you’d cite for y

That is not of Unicode's concern. Markup is reserved for higher-level things and is not done within Unicode. Well, I’m not sure what authority you’d cite for your statements about what is or is not Unicode’s concern, but right on page 3 in chapter 1 we have: “The Unicode Standard began with a simple goal: to unify the many hundreds of conflicting ways to encode characters, replacing them with a single, universal standard. [...] Whenever textual data was converted between different programs or platforms, there was a substantial risk of corruption.” That sounds familiar, given the various contexts I mentioned before. I wonder whether the cost of all the software bugs ever caused by getting quoting/escaping wrong is greater than other repeat offenders like dereferencing nulls. Then on page 8 in chapter 2 there are several explicit text processes mentioned, including user interaction and treating text as bulk data. I do understand that a basic principle of Unicode is to represent plain text rather than mark-up, but it seems to me that avoiding problems with representing widely used text strings in different ways using different quoting and escaping conventions is consistent with that principle and exactly the kind of lack of standardisation that Unicode should help with. There are already more than 60 control characters in Unicode. There are also many characters that aren’t described as control characters but which convey things like layout information or rendering hints, such as the non-breaking space, soft hyphen, and direction controls. I know that language tags are deprecated, but those are rather complicated and context-specific and, as the standard itself observes, supporting them is a significant burden on implementers, so I don’t think it is reasonable to equate that situation with what I suggested. On balance, as a practical matter, if you're working in a text-only medium, your character set is all you have. If anything else must be done using some form of mark-up built with the same character set, then a simple, unambiguous, standardised way to switch from one to the other seems entirely consistent with the general goals of the Unicode project. Links to relevant sources: http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/ch01.pdf http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/ch01.pdf http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/ch02.pdf http://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode6.2.0/ch02.pdf