[arh68]

Great article. Informative, qualified. I had not realized how splintered the [E]BNF syntax is, like in the way I already knew timestamps are (3339 vs 8601 vs mm/dd/yyyy &c &c).

Q: what's your ideal way to write Unicode characters clearly? In the W3C/XML spec they'll have stuff like [#x200C-#x200D] but I have no idea what those are, without like a dictionary on hand. Points for specificity, but it doesn't scream "readable".

Your point about standards-not-publicly-available is unfortunately similar to, well, laws. In some areas, "the laws" themselves are not public (!) though perhaps it's a digression better to not get into

pedantically, s/unabiguously/unambiguously/g

[dwheeler]

In many cases I think the character itself is clearest. Thankfully most tools can handle Unicode today. That's not always unambiguous, so sometimes an annotation may be helpful, and if the spec is freely available you can copy amd paste from it.