[JdeBP]

It's clear from the demonstration video alone that this is not an ASCII system, and indeed reading the doco confirms that the text files are considered to be UTF-8.

This gives some irony to your analysis. Because this system thus permits one of the the very same ancient expression-in-images systems that you are alluding to: hieroglyphs are in Unicode.

I expect that in the 9 years of its existence, almost no-one has ever used them in this system.

[sssilver]

The word "ASCII" was a grotesque, artistic verbal presentation choice for the substance of content I intended to convey :)

I figured it supports UTF-8. I believe the gist of my point is still valid.

Images are content. Layout is content. Typesetting is content. All are components of expression.

[JdeBP]

Alas, it isn't valid if one goes beyond even reading the doco.

The underlying library that the tool uses, click (https://click.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/), turns out to include the idea that the "tweet" strings can contain ECMA-48 control sequences.

This permits not only boldface and italics, but also (on very old terminals and very modern terminal emulators) underline, strikethrough, faint, reverse video, invisible, and even 8 whole colours. (-:

Again, though, I expect that in the 9 years of the system's existence, no-one has actually used this in earnest.

In part, this is because the default mode seems to be to apply a regular expression substitution to attempt to strip out control sequences, because of course ECMA-48 and ECMA-35 are over-expressive permitting things like OSC, NEL, PM, APC, cursor motions ("layout is content"), insert/delete/erase, and code page changes.

Amusingly, the regular expression substitution is not based upon an understanding of ECMA-35 and is faulty.

[maximinus_thrax]

> The word "ASCII" was a grotesque, artistic verbal presentation choice for the substance of content I intended to convey :)

Is this GPT generated? I find it hard to believe someone actually talks/writes like this.

[sssilver]

I promise it isn’t. English however isn’t my native language — I grew up in Armenia, with Armenian as my native tongue and Russian as my first “foreign” language.

[maximinus_thrax]

Interesting. I'm in a similar situation, but my first foreign language was French. I believe the source of English education makes a difference. In my case, it was Rambo movies :))