Re:Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
by mark-r on Thursday April 30, 2020 @12:17PM
(#23032541)
In particular there was a desire to make sure that a round trip from some legacy character set to Unicode and back to the legacy character set wouldn't lose information. So many characters that you would assume to be the same are given multiple code points to make that possible.
That's simple. The justification for most characters, including the exemplary one you mentioned, is that they were already encoded in some other repertoire. The consortium's task is to collect and unify them.