161–170 of 429 posts
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.
Where does adding new Unicode symbols stop?
When there are no more to add or the symbol space is full. Until then, no reason to halt it as far as I'm concerned.
When do we stop handing out IPv4s by the hundreds of thousands? "When we run out". When do we stop doing 120km/h? "When we run out of road". When do we stop spending money? "When we're flat out broke".
(Note: I am not advocating for or against the unicode case, I'm making a point about the specific mindset used to justify this)
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.
It actually exists as an official font file published by Prince himself: 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' ?
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.
I hear you. If you want pictures then use a markup language. Unfortunately it is too late now. We finally had an almost universally supported character set, and then we ruined it with levitating men in business suits. Recent Unicode versions introduce far more technical challenges than they solve. For instance, now that code points can come with colour, there are conflicting requirements between the requested text co…
Your fonts don't have to support the entirety of Unicode. That's why we have font stacks and fallbacks.
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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…
> Still 16 bits would not be enough, it's only 65536 different code pages, less than half of what is currently in Unicode. But that's only because Unicode has significantly ventured well beyond what we consider to be text. The BMP is enough to represent all text (including math).
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People who don't speak English? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_symbol
Why is it easier to infer that 'O' means off than 'OFF' for a person who does not know any English?
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You don't have to be able to read the word ON to recognize it as a symbol. "Circle next to zigzag-thing" is as good as circle with line sticking out of it.
There's also precedent. Continental Europe standardized on "STOP" on stop signs back in the 70's, even though no continental language has "stop" in it.
Stop is a word in Dutch (the first recognisable use of the word I could find dates back to 1287). And German has stopf. I couldn't find a date for that, because my German isn't good enough to read their etymology dictionary, but it's source is Old High Germanic, so it's safe to say that stop has been around in continental Europe in Germanic languages since Medieval time at the very least.
Edit: A quick further Google search reveals that Norwegian and Danish (and thus most likely Sweden too) have the variation "stoppe" derived from Low German.
Seems a bit disingenuous to claim it was adopted despite "not being an existing word" if two languages use the exact rendering on the sign and 4 others use/have words that are so closely related that they have the same spelling, but 1 or 2 additional letters.
Further edit: French apparently adopted the word stop from English...in 1792
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> useless symbols? Just because they are useless to you doesn't mean they are useless to everyone.
True but I think that is also problematic. The more symbols there are the less likely it is that every font covers all the symbols that someone might find important. For instance, I often get e-mails with characters that can't be displayed because my standard fonts (on linux) don't have them. The "missing unicode symbol" icon is the new "picture not found" icon[0] In fact, it is even worse as there is no alt attribut…
Why would every font need to cover them in the first place? Just one is enough with symbolic characters, sufficient to display them. Text renderers can deal with that.
No font coverage is also fine, at least the data is preserved.
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When there are no more to add or the symbol space is full. Until then, no reason to halt it as far as I'm concerned.
That... is a terrible mindset. When do we stop handing out IPv4s by the hundreds of thousands? "When we run out". When do we stop doing 120km/h? "When we run out of road". When do we stop spending money? "When we're flat out broke". (Note: I am not advocating for or against the unicode case, I'm making a point about the specific mindset used to justify this )
I think the question represents an equally terrible mindset, "when do we stop?" How can I answer that, honestly? Is there a number? Or is it when a certain date has come and gone? How do we pick that number? Or that date? Why do we need to stop? I understand why we might want to rate-limit the adoption of new glyphs, but I don't see why we'd ever draw a line in the sand and say, "Ok, now it's frozen." Imagine if that had happened before the creation of the Euro as a currency.
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That... is a terrible mindset. When do we stop handing out IPv4s by the hundreds of thousands? "When we run out". When do we stop doing 120km/h? "When we run out of road". When do we stop spending money? "When we're flat out broke". (Note: I am not advocating for or against the unicode case, I'm making a point about the specific mindset used to justify this )
I phrased it rather crudely. I really meant "when there is no more to add". With the caveat that running out is the other option. I think the question represents an equally terrible mindset, "when do we stop?" How can I answer that, honestly? Is there a number? Or is it when a certain date has come and gone? How do we pick that number? Or that date? Why do we need to stop? I understand why we might want to rate-limit…