How about the OS adopting the convention that any codes outside of a few trusted (expected) alphabets get displayed in a way that makes it obvious to a human that they aren't what they look like (eg, a bright red border or something).
AIUI, there are two major reasons this wasn't done in the first place, and why more complex solutions are necessary:
1. Those few trusted alphabets would probably include Greek, Cyrillic, and Latin, all of which have similar or identical characters with different Unicode code points.
2. The goal of Unicode support, localized domain names, etc. is for software to be equally easy to use for all languages, rather than to favor some languages over others.
That said, it might be advantageous to have a locale-specific approach, so that characters not used by the current language will be highlighted. But, that could be seen as hindering the ability of sites in one region to reach users in another region, doesn't work well for text that includes multiple languages, and malware writers will probably find a way to mark their characters as expected anyway.
Edit: also, the two words "get displayed" paper over a vast amount of complexity in the way operating systems and applications display text. It would probably be just as much work as any of the other solutions proposed.
How about the OS adopting the convention that any codes outside of a few trusted (expected) alphabets get displayed in a way that makes it obvious to a human that they aren't what they look like (eg, a bright red border or something).
AIUI, there are two major reasons this wasn't done in the first place, and why more complex solutions are necessary:
1. Those few trusted alphabets would probably include Greek, Cyrillic, and Latin, all of which have similar or identical characters with different Unicode code points.
2. The goal of Unicode support, localized domain names, etc. is for software to be equally easy to use for all languages, rather than to favor some languages over others.
That said, it might be advantageous to have a locale-specific approach, so that characters not used by the current language will be highlighted. But, that could be seen as hindering the ability of sites in one region to reach users in another region, doesn't work well for text that includes multiple languages, and malware writers will probably find a way to mark their characters as expected anyway.
Edit: also, the two words "get displayed" paper over a vast amount of complexity in the way operating systems and applications display text. It would probably be just as much work as any of the other solutions proposed.