It also eliminate dieresis from the language, naive not naïve, and strips all accents from loan words
I've been kicking around thoughts on Unicode and various codepoints, and which really ought or ought not be used.
It is decidedly complex. I've got in mind a simplified coding, though, for common interchange formats. Effectively a glyphic pidgen. Presuming "glyphic" is a word.
(1913 Webster says it is. Hurrah!)
Ah, a prescriptivist!
In many rich text generators, an em dash is often made with three hyphens, but for as-is plain text, I find three hyphens excessive. In my opinion, most of the usage of the en dash -- the rival, shorter dash -- occurs in situations where you wish to connect, rather than set apart, so while typing in ASCII for the things you'd use an en dash for, a single unspaced hyphen suffices.
I don't know the difference between em-dash and en-dash. But I'd also wager that you don't stumble and come to a grinding halt when you see a - in the middle of a sentence, like a robot trying to parse words as arithmetic.
I've never, ever once had anyone complain to me that my meaning was unclear when using a - or ' in an email, but I've seen encodings get jumbled. There's no gain for me to not stick to ascii in 99% of cases.