“Utext: Rich Unicode Documents § HTML Utext”, Gwern2023-10-08 (CSS)⁠:

An esoteric document proposal: abuse Unicode to create the fanciest possible ‘plain text’ documents.

How can we make Utext useful for websites?

By adding in the single missing ingredient of hypertext: active, clickable links.

And we can do that by defining a HTML wrapper which permits only literal text displays (in <pre> tags), <a> HTML hyperlinks, and the minimal amount of CSS to render this pleasingly on desktop/mobile.

This HTML Utext gives us a highly-esoteric textfiles-style format which nevertheless could work for a website.

• Background
• Unicode
  • Rich Unicode
    • Advanced Utext
  • Utext Markup
  • Text + Source Storage
  • Utext Format
    • HTML Utext
      • Hypertext?
      • <pre>
      • Styling
      • CSS
• External Links