An easy blogpost for an easy day:

Every piece of software that generates footnotes should use unicode superscript numbers instead of html superscript numbers.

That's my claim. To illustrate, if you're using markdown you can write something like the following:

Hello.[^my_footnote_name]

[^my_footnote_name]: This claim has been fact-checked by true patriots at https://example.com!

and it will render (or perhaps already rendered, if you're viewing this plaintext blogpost in a markdown viewer for some reason) as something like the following:

Hello.¹

1: This claim has been fact-checked by true patriots at https://example.com! ⤣

However, here's the problem: they will actually generate something like Hello.<sup>1</sup>

If this ever has to be used or pass through a plain text context — which is quite likely these days — such as if someone copy-pastes it, or previews it as an embed, etc etc, then it will most likely lose its formatting and decay to 

Hello.1

1: This claim has been fact-checked by true patriots at https://example.com! ⤣

This error is common and ugly. And for what reason? No reason. Unicode already provides you with character fit for this purpose. You can just use the correct text.