> The Unicode people veered off the tracks and sank into a swamp when they decided that semantic information should be encoded into Unicode characters.
As if that weren't enough, they also decided to cram half-assed formatting into it. You got bold letters, italics, various fancy-style letters, superscripts and subscripts for this and that.. all for the sake of leagacy compatibility. Unicode was legacy right from the beginning.
The "fonts" in Unicode are meant to be for math and scientific symbols, and not a stylistic choice. Don't use them for text, as it can be a cacophony in screen readers.
Unicode chose to support lossless conversion to and from other encodings it replaces (I presume it was important for adoption), so unfortunately it inherited the sum of everyone else's tech debt.
Unicode did worse than that. They added code points to esrever the direction of text rendering. Naturally, this turned out to be useful for injecting malware into source code, because having the text rendered backwards and forwards erases the display of the malware, so people can't see it.
Note that nobody needs these code points to reverse text. I did it above without gnisu those code points.
As if that weren't enough, they also decided to cram half-assed formatting into it. You got bold letters, italics, various fancy-style letters, superscripts and subscripts for this and that.. all for the sake of leagacy compatibility. Unicode was legacy right from the beginning.