There are a couple I have in mind. Like many techies, I am a huge fan of RSS for content distribution and XMPP for federated communication.
The really niche one I like is S-expressions as a data format and configuration in place of json, yaml, toml, etc.
I am a big fan of Plaintext formats, although I wish markdown had a few more features like tables.
Does unicode have bold/italics/underline/headings/tables/
Yes, and even ππππ»π» ππππ π £π ·π π. And table lines & edges & co. are even already in ASCII.
Isnβt that outside of its intended goal?
π€·<- this emoji has at least 6 color variants and 3 genders.
If not, how is markup unnecessary?
Because the editor could place a π―πΌπΉπ± instead of a **bold**, which is a best-case-scenario with markdown support btw. And i just had to escspe the stars, which is a problem that native unicode doesnβt pose.
What about people who prefer to type **bold** rather than type a word, highlight it, and find the Bold option in whichever textbox editor they happen to be using?
Which is what i ask for, better (or at all) support for unicode character variations, including soft keyboards.
Imagine, there was a switch for bold, cursive, etc on your phone keyboard, why would you want to type markup?
And nobody would take **bold** away, if you want to write that.
I donβt like that approach. Text search wonβt find all the different possible Unicode representations.
Would you have to do that for every letter? I suppose a βbold-on/bold-offβ character combination would be better/easier, and then you could combine multiple styles without multiplying the number of glyphs by some ridiculous number.
Anyways, because markup is already standardized, mostly. Having both unicode and markup would be a nightmare. More complicated markup (bulleted lists, tables) is simpler than it would be in Unicode. And markup is outside of Unicodeβs intended purpose, which is to have a collection of every glyph. Styling is separate from glyphs, and has been for a long time, for good reason. Fonts, bold/italics/underline/strikethrough, color, tables and lists, headings, font size, etc. are simply not something Unicode is designed to handle.
