I don't understand. No matter what fancy things you do with superscripts and subscripts, you're not going to be able to do even basic things you need for equations like use a fraction bar, or parentheses that grow in height to match the content inside them.
At a fundamental level, Unicode is for characters, not layout. Unicode may abuse the ZWJ for emoji, but it still ultimately results in a single emoji character, not a layout of characters. So I don't really understand what you're asking for.
> No matter what fancy things you do with superscripts and subscripts, you're not going to be able to do even basic things you need for equations like use a fraction bar, or parentheses that grow in height to match the content inside them.
Why not? Things like Arabic ligatures already do that, no?
Agreed. I think MathML is intended for layout of formulas and integrated into browsers nowdays, but I never used it, so don't know if essentials are missing?