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> Furthermore, the existing widespread practice of representing this sign on web pages using images (often specified via CSS styles) would be unlikely to benefit from attempting to encode a character for this image.

Obviously enough text-mode browsers would be likely to benefit.

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This made my head spin. It's like saying people already using the JIS text encoding would be unlikely to benefit from adding Japanese to Unicode. Absolutely mind blowing.

No, it is saying that Unicode is used to encode what people think of as plain text, and that UI symbols that are not part of the text content are outside the scope of it.

I agree that text mode browsers would benefit, as they can hide the external nature of a URL behind non-URL link text, and not allow an image next to it.

But it seems that to be a codepoint, it needs to be useful in plain text scenarios. Text mode browsers which render links as discussed are not plain text.

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