There are two big lessons from this discussion, IMHO.
Firstly, broad character sets are all very well, but they have limited value if you can’t rely on everyone using your text being able to see them. Something like the ö (o-umlaut) is a reasonable thing to expect in modern Western fonts, but what about the emoticons I’m increasingly seeing in e-mails, or more advanced mathematical operators, or the cat in the title of this very article that many people commenting here can’t see in some contexts?
We need much better standardisation and prioritisation of sets of related glyphs that are, for example, permitted by the coding standards for a software project or supported by a font file. ASCII is too small, all of Unicode is too big, and picking glyphs for inclusion in fonts one at a time is too fine-grained for this purpose.
Secondly, it is crazy that with literally a million code points available in Unicode world, we don’t seem to have new control characters for “begin literal” and “end literal” to mark a range of text that should be interpreted verbatim regardless of context. Instead, we’re still using horrible hacks like quoting and escaping in environments like command lines and source code, and in text file formats like comma- or tab-separated values. These kinds of techniques are, invariably, horribly error-prone and terrible for usability; after all, in the case we’re discussing, it seems to be the apostrophe that is causing more problems than the ö! I think the computing world would be a much easier place for many, many people if there were one universal standard way of saying, “This is plain text”.
Firstly, broad character sets are all very well, but they have limited value if you can’t rely on everyone using your text being able to see them. Something like the ö (o-umlaut) is a reasonable thing to expect in modern Western fonts, but what about the emoticons I’m increasingly seeing in e-mails, or more advanced mathematical operators, or the cat in the title of this very article that many people commenting here can’t see in some contexts?
We need much better standardisation and prioritisation of sets of related glyphs that are, for example, permitted by the coding standards for a software project or supported by a font file. ASCII is too small, all of Unicode is too big, and picking glyphs for inclusion in fonts one at a time is too fine-grained for this purpose.
Secondly, it is crazy that with literally a million code points available in Unicode world, we don’t seem to have new control characters for “begin literal” and “end literal” to mark a range of text that should be interpreted verbatim regardless of context. Instead, we’re still using horrible hacks like quoting and escaping in environments like command lines and source code, and in text file formats like comma- or tab-separated values. These kinds of techniques are, invariably, horribly error-prone and terrible for usability; after all, in the case we’re discussing, it seems to be the apostrophe that is causing more problems than the ö! I think the computing world would be a much easier place for many, many people if there were one universal standard way of saying, “This is plain text”.