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How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

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Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#241

Post by wmil »

agumonkey wrote: post #227

I'm a bit confused about Unicode. It was a repository of linguistic symbols, not raw symbols. More and more it looks like wingdings. Isn't this putting burden on font support and Text processing (what's the lexicographic order of such symbols, using the abstract name ?) ?

They want every symbol used in a document to have a unique encoding, so that you can change fonts without losing meaning. Fonts like wingdings are a horrible hack.

The idea is one (complex) encoding that will represent the info until the end of time. It creates a lot of trouble, but it's still a good idea.

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#243

Post by pron »

cbd1984 wrote: post #229
pron wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's nice, except the BMP doesn't encode all of Chinese, and it includes a number of weird control characters for compatibility with ASCII. Like Vertical Tab. Who uses Vertical Tab anymore? The dream of a 16-bit Unicode washed up on the rocks of CJK scripts. It's dead and it isn't going to be revived. You can argue for a simpler standard, with fewer assigned codepoints, but the original BMP isn't it and was never g…

> but the original BMP isn't it and was never going to be it.

I concede this point. I still don't see why the Unicode Consortium should spend effort standardizing non-text as text.

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#244

Post by dalke »

merijnv wrote: post #167
WalterBright wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Excuse me? No continental European language has the word stop in it? You should probably learn more languages before making claims like that. 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…

In Swedish it's "stopp".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_sign#Stop_signs_around_th... shows examples of "Stop" used in Germany and Italy in the 1950s.

The German Wikipedia, at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoppschild , gives an example of "stop" used in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia) in 1939, though it says the sign was an imported variant.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stoppen#German points out:

> As in Dutch stoppen, the sense “to stop” is figurative from water flow being stopped by plugging. Only in this figurative meaning has the form been adopted into standard German proper, under the reinforcing influence of English to stop.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/stop gives a list of continental European languages where 'stop' is part of the language. Nearly all borrow from the English. Not Dutch, however.

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#245

Post by mcv »

agumonkey wrote: post #227

I'm a bit confused about Unicode. It was a repository of linguistic symbols, not raw symbols. More and more it looks like wingdings. Isn't this putting burden on font support and Text processing (what's the lexicographic order of such symbols, using the abstract name ?) ?

I agree. I do see the usefulness of these symbols, but I'm not sure why emojis need official support.

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#246

Post by GrantSolar »

onion2k wrote: post #104
prima-facie wrote: post #99

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?

having every possible glyph in UTF8 seems like a horrible waste A horrible waste of what? Unicode 9.0 encodes 128,172 characters, of a possible total 1,112,064 code points. The addressable space is 11.52% full. Clearly there's enough left to keep adding more and more characters for a really long time. If your complaint is that it's a waste of resources, time, etc - surely it's up to the people who are members of the…

I believe it's an issue with time resources. I would argue that new emoji characters are one of the less important uses of Unicode [1]. You are right that it is entirely up to the members of the Unicode consortium to manage their efforts themselves, but that doesn't mean we can't complain about that. I see a lot of these cases as bikeshedding

[1]https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#247

Post by copperx »

js8 wrote: post #143
akiselev wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What isn't a huge goddamn mess after several centuries? If there's one thing we humans don't deal with well, it's entropy.

Actually, humans, just like any other living organism, deal with entropy quite well - they dump it onto others. :-)

Onto the next generation :/

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#248

Post by gwbas1c »

acz wrote: post #238
tangus wrote: post #55

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…

Let’s start working on "SVG over UTF" RFC, should we?

Honestly, I think "SVG over UTF" makes a lot more sense. It's impossible to make a character set that supports every character known to man, because that just adds undue effort on every computer maker, ect, to keep up.

So why don't we pick a very good set: perhaps every letter in every language in common use for the past 200 years? Then, for the oddball symbols that someone wants to mix in text, there can be some kind of SVG-like convention. This allows publishing textual information without requiring that every device maker updates their device to support a 1-off symbol.

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#249

Post by copperx »

kens wrote: post #101
tangus wrote: post #55

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.)

I have never read a book that had a snowman in the running text, so what's the story for emoji?

Re: How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

#250

Post by ivl »

TorKlingberg wrote: post #159
andyjohnson0 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And emoji are a totally separate story. Recent article on the Unicode/emoji debate: https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/inside-emojigeddon-th...

Unicode 9.0 adds 7500 characters, 72 of which are emoji, so I think the "Emojigeddon" is a bit exaggerated.

Sounds like 72 too many if you ask me.

In all seriousness, I'm not sure emoji's really belong in text encoding. Even though it's more convenient, based on where they're most frequently used I don't think they need to be universal.

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