121–130 of 429 posts
Legitimate question: Why is Unicode littered with all those useless symbols? I can see the reasoning behind the standard (or very common) symbols or things like emoji, but having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste. What if we want to add new glyphs in the next 10 years for emerging standards?
I'm still waiting for a Unicode codepoint for Love Symbol #2 (aka The Artist Formerly Known as Prince). There are codepoints for dead Chinese emperors, there should be one for Prince.
http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/princes-legendary-floppy-...
I don't know the codepoint for it though. Does anyone (other than the guy mentioned in the article) actually have this 'Prince Font' ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not bad, but it's complicated, as it requires an O(n) algorithm to jump to a specific character. Unicode should have been capped at 16 bits, and doubling text files in size is fine. An alternate representation of simplified UTF-8 would have kept compatibility with old ASCII files.
Doubling text files is a waste for the most part, but what makes it tolerable is compression. Still 16 bits would not be enough, it's only 65536 different code pages, less than half of what is currently in Unicode. 24 bit is sufficiently out of allignment with modern hardware and algorithms, so 32 bit it is for efficiency. That is now 4 times the size, and compression is now a requirement. In any case, Utf8 has a pla…
maybe there should be like a universal unicode for all the icons that apps might need that represent common functionality and they should be animated to represent an either on or off state for some of them. also top brand square logos should be added into the unicode as well. and then different forks/variations can be submitted for the unicode and be accepted if they are useful and good looking. also they should all…
https://materialdesignicons.com/ makes a font available with a reasonably large selection of brand and functionality icons, using unicode private ranges (also svg or whatever). I don't think i personally agree with brand logos in Unicode.
Seconded, brands come and go, as do their logos, many large corporations have gone through several logo changes.
Pan-Am is the main one that springs to mind (or it's because I've just re-watched Blade Runner AGAIN...)
The success of the unicodepowersymbol proposal inspired me to suggest a couple characters to Unicode (the Bitcoin sign and IBM's group mark from 1960s mainframes, which were accepted). The point is that Unicode really is open to proposals from random people; you don't need to part of a big company to influence Unicode.
It's really cool than these things can happen. Still, I can't help but feel like, in a couple of centuries, Unicode is gonna be a goddamn mess.
While there was considerable uproar over Emoji and there still often is over yet another fifteen symbols that everyone thinks no one would ever need or use, the bulk of the Unicode character set is still scripts for human languages. And some of those are only relevant for a very small minority, say, archaeologists. But that's fine. There's enough space, we're nowhere near to running out and Unicode enabled all sorts of cool things in computing that simply were not possible before or only with awful hacks and workarounds.
On a related note, the main character of my unfinished game [0] will be pleased about this.
How did the Unicode Consortium turn around. I remember 10 years ago they were refusing to add standard media icons because >The scope of the Unicode Standard (and ISO/IEC 10646) does not extend to encoding every symbol or sign that bears meaning in the world. >This list has been round and round and round on this -- regular as clockwork, about once a year, the topic comes up again. And I see no indication that the UTC…
Unicode is supposed to include symbols that appear in "running text", not standalone icons. So no on traffic signs for instance. (There are exceptions for historical reasons. And emoji are a totally separate story.)
The past tense of "lead" (rhymes with bead) is not also "lead". When did the word "led" disappear from the English language?
It hasn't disappeared (Google Ngram viewer shows a consistent occurrence of "led" since 1800). It's just a common error due to (1) inconsistency with "read" (same spelling for present and past tense) and (2) the noun "lead" being pronounced "led".