Trying to figure out how to express this without making people mad at me. I think the conflation of Unicode with "plain text" might be a mistake. Don't get me wrong, Unicode serves an important purpose. But bumping the version from plain text 1.0 (ASCII) to plain text 2.0 (Unicode) introduced a ton of complexity, and there are cases where the abstractions start leaking (iterating characters etc).
With things like data archival, if I have a hard drive with the library of congress stored in ASCII, I need half a sheet of paper to understand how to decode it.
Whereas apparently UTF8 requires 7k words just to explain why it's important. And that's not even looking at the spec.
Just to be crystal clear, I'm not advocating to not use Unicode, or even use it less. I'm just saying I think it maybe shouldn't count as plain text, since it looks a lot like a relatively complicated binary format to me.
With things like data archival, if I have a hard drive with the library of congress stored in ASCII, I need half a sheet of paper to understand how to decode it.
Whereas apparently UTF8 requires 7k words just to explain why it's important. And that's not even looking at the spec.
Just to be crystal clear, I'm not advocating to not use Unicode, or even use it less. I'm just saying I think it maybe shouldn't count as plain text, since it looks a lot like a relatively complicated binary format to me.