YayText: A text styling tool for Facebook, Twitter, etc.

I don't think this "hack" points to Unicode doing too much.

For questionable technical design decisions, look at UTF16, surrogate pairs, etc.

e.g.

ℝ denotes the set of real numbers, whilst R denotes the gas constant. 𝐑 would by convention be the name of some matrix.

ln is the natural logarithm, 𝑙𝑛 is the product of 𝑙 and 𝑛. (Only a monster would actually write ln 𝑙𝑛, though.)

I don't know why the consortium chose to include these glyphs rather than push it out to markup languages, though.

There is always what we had before: ASCII + Codepages, 128 standard fixed chars and 128 "extended" chars dependent on the selected Codepage. We could've just agreed on a control character to use as an escape for switching codepage and called it done. That wouldn't have given us such robust support for diacritics however.

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