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The meta goal is usability. This shouldn't be a philosophical debate about what constitute a symbol...
The reason for rejection, for better or worse, is that this is a functional element, like a button, rather than part of running text.
That didn't stop the Unicode Consortium from including a left-pointing magnifying glass in the standard. I use this on my blog for the search button.
Annoy everyone enough, and we can redefine the nunicode codepoints as rationals and hand the denominator to another group.
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Hacker News lets some emoji and Unicode through, but I’m not sure how it’s chosen. Here’s some I copied from Wikipedia’s page on emoji: ℹ ⌛🀄🈚
Weird, I've never seen any before this thread, I thought they were all stripped. Bug or feature, I wonder?
The author seems to be using a very limited definition of "plain text". Emoji are clearly used in the same way as latin-character text in communication, so they are effectively plain text.
I think a more effective argument may be that the external-link symbol should be allowed for the same reasons that the power on/off/toggle and eject symbols were allowed.
> It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text... As the author pointed out, emojis seem to clearly violate this excuse. What possible justification do they give for emojis? There is no way [I originally inserted the poop emoji here, but it was stripped out. That kind of reinforces my point.] is an element of plain text.
So there's a situation of dual standards - all the weird characters that were included in any pre-Unicode text encodings for whatever arbitrary reasons are in Unicode and are always going to be there; but all the new weird characters need appropriate justification for inclusion and are likely to be denied.
> It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text... As the author pointed out, emojis seem to clearly violate this excuse. What possible justification do they give for emojis? There is no way [I originally inserted the poop emoji here, but it was stripped out. That kind of reinforces my point.] is an element of plain text.
I find myself agreeing with the rejection. As much as I dislike the ridiculous amount of emojis in Unicode, and their increasingly widespread use, they do fit plain text communication, whereas an "external link" symbol does not. My heuristic is something I'll call SMS sniff test : would it make sense to type that symbol into a text message? If it wouldn't, then it doesn't belong in Unicode. "External link" symbol tel…
I'm not a regular user of SMS, but it seems to me like adding links to SMS messages is either already available or not a bad idea. The "SMS sniff test" seems pretty weak to me. A better one would be a printed document.
Modern SMS readers will linkify the URL, but will set the visible text equal to the URL, so again it wouldn't benefit from the symbol.
This explanation mirrors the rejection rationale: you don't need a symbol to be a Unicode character if the document is already rich text; the symbol can be an image instead. If you have anchor tags, you probably also have image tags or CSS.
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Can you imagine it in paper documents or anywhere that is not hypertext?
Yes, I've seen it used as a way to steer the reader to open their browser for further information with URL written in plain text. Like hyper footnote
God, they spend so much time on emoji which is much the same. They are becoming a bit of a joke!
You don't expect to be able to click emoji, and they don't lose their meaning when printed out on paper.
I wonder why there are actually so many people ITT who argue this new symbol would have no use and no meaning in print...