But why? The trend towards putting icons into Unicode may be a mistake. Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence, there's no real reason to have it in Unicode. Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library.
ఠ_ఠ don't say that
How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
41–50 of 429 posts
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#42As the story mentions regarding the off symbol (a circle), there are many visually identical code points that have different semantic meanings. But in this case, they added an additional semantic meaning to an existing code point. So which is it? Does each code point represent a visual image? A semantic meaning? Both? It depends? Something else? I've tried to decipher that on my own and only learned that the answer t…
"So which is it? Does each code point represent a visual image? A semantic meaning? Both? It depends? Something else?" Well the answer is clear: each code point represents one visual image, to which is associated one or more meanings.
That is not the compromise struck, though; there are even many Cyrillic glyphs that are visually identical to those in Latin, but assigned differing codepoints.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#43But why? The trend towards putting icons into Unicode may be a mistake. Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence, there's no real reason to have it in Unicode. Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library.
If I understand correctly, Unicode only provides the semantic meaning, not the actual rendering. The font provides information for how to render it. Am I right?
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#44I already ranted about unicode earlier today, my main argument is, that unicode is what happens if everybody qualified thinks: "That's a great idea, of course you have to handle X and Y and Z and I just remember that I forgot to fill out several warranty cards." This blog post is a nice example, I have absolutely no idea how these new code points are supposed to look like, since I only spend an afternoon to implement…
I think that the BMP -- Basic Multilingual Plane or the first 16-bit of Unicode characters -- is pretty reasonable, and covers fairly well everything we may consider as text (all alphabets in current use plus mathematical symbols). Anything beyond that, from emojis and pictograms to ancient Greek musical notation is pretty... weird. I think it would have made much more sense to have something like image tags: a speci…
I mostly agree. In my opinion, separating code points from encodings (without providing a replacement for txt files) was the original sin of unicode. That just adds a lot of complexity with very little gain. (Suppose we would have standardized from ASCII to a 64 bit per character standard encoding, then text files would grow by a factor of 8 and nothing important would have happened.^1)
^1 I am pretty sure that some use cases actually profit a lot, but neither text file formats (since most text does not contain 2^64 different characters zip would work nicely) nor networking (since most data on the internet is either video or torrents) seem to be among them. So probably they would not be huge fields.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#45But why? The trend towards putting icons into Unicode may be a mistake. Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence, there's no real reason to have it in Unicode. Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library.
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Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#46But why? The trend towards putting icons into Unicode may be a mistake. Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence, there's no real reason to have it in Unicode. Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library.
ఠ_ఠ don't say that
The eyes in your emoticon are actually the letter 'ta' in Telugu, a regional Indian language.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#47Unicode symbols... seems like we should've developed them the way languages develop: start with the most important symbols, ones for food, water, shelter, danger, etc, then expanded them into the abstract mess they are today.
Emoji were not developed haphazardly. They evolved naturally in Japan, then were adopted by the rest of the world. That is why there are so many Asia / Japan themes in the standard emoji set. The problem is Westerners don't understand the Japanese emotion behind the symbol. The symbol for bookbag looks exactly like a Japanese school kid's backpack. It's why there is a kimono. Bamboo wind chimes. Tsunami. Shinkansen... I could go on and on.
In some respect, they are getting jumbled up because of international pressures for the base emoji set to be stretched into a be-all for the global market. An example is Taco. There are tacos in Japan. They are hard to find and when you do find one, you definitely don't want to eat one there. Mexican food is one of the rare cuisines the Japanese don't do better.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#48But why? The trend towards putting icons into Unicode may be a mistake. Unless it's a symbol one uses in a sentence, there's no real reason to have it in Unicode. Unicode should not be viewed as a standard clip art library.
I believe they are much more legitimate symbols to put to Unicode than Emoji. They are standardized (IEEE 1621), they frequently appear in the running text (of particular kind, but widespread enough), and they have distinct semantics from existing characters and symbols. In terms of worthiness they are on par with math symbols, enough for justifying the inclusion.
Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#49Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters
#50Will there just eventually be one emoji for each distinct concept?
Time to just add Emoji as another CJK language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_Unified_Ideographs
CJK stands for Chinese (traditional and simplified), Japanese, and Korean. Adding Emoji would make it:
Japanese, Oriental, Korean, and Emoji.
It's a bad JOKE.