this Unicode recommendation leads to content corruption when the related markup is stripped off. That may occur sooner than expected, e.g. in Word (2010) when a character style is applied.
The solution is to find better ways to apply character styles.
For example, if a style definition is intended to ensure that something is in italics (for emphasis), then changing all formatting for the text is overkill. There may be very valid reasons to not remove super/subscript, font bindings (other than switch from regular to italic version of a font) or even text color. Finally, in changing text to an italic style, any words already in italics might be toggled rather than blindly switched - that's what human typesetters tend to do.
Looking at it this way, your beef is not with character encoding, but with limitations (needlessly) imposed by software.
A./
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Thu Dec 29 2016 - 18:29:17 CST