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> There are rather few legitimate uses of some zero-width characters, like ZWJ in emoji composition.

Emojis are another abomination that should be removed from Unicode. If you want pictures, use a gif.

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Arguably them being in Unicode is an accessibility issue, unless we thought to standardize GIF names, and then that already sounds a lot like Unicode.
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How is it an accessibility issue? HTML allows things like little gif files. I've done this myself when I wrote text that contained Egyptian hieroglyphs. It works just fine!
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I mean if you don't have sight.
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Then use words. Or tooltips (HTML supports that). I use tooltips on my web pages to support accessibility for screen readers. Unicode should not be attempting to badly reinvent HTML.
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( ꏿ ﹏ ꏿ ; )
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I think there’s debate (which I don’t want to participate in) over whether or not invisible characters have their uses in Unicode. But I hope we can all agree that invisible characters have no business in code, and banishing them is reasonable.
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In our repos, we have some basic stuff like ruff that runs, and that includes a hard error on any Unicode characters. We mostly did this after some un-fun times when byte order marks somehow ended up in a file and it made something fail.

I have considered allowing a short list that does not include emojis, joining characters, and so on - basically just currency symbols, accent marks, and everything else you'd find in CP-1521 but never got around to it.

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