Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#61

Post by goto11 » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:37 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #42

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…

Yeah a lot of arguments are of the form "when Unicode can include the pile-of-poop-emoji, surely it should include ".

But the question is not if the icon is practical or silly, the question is if it makes sense as a Unicode character or should be handled at some other level like a GUI control or widget.

Should GUI icons, widgets and controls be covered by Unicode? That is a can of worms.

I understand the usefulness of the "external link" icon, but should it really be something you arbitrarily type into a text? Shouldn't it be part of the rendering of a link?

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#62

Post by hunter2_ » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:39 AM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #45

TeMPOraL wrote: post #42

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 agree with you but including it would make it easier to express in text-only environments

Plain text environments never encounter the problem that this symbol solves, which is to reveal that an anchor tag (which is not plain text, and typically has visible text that isn't the URL) leads to some other authority.

But for a text mode interface that does have full blown anchor tags -- not very mainstream -- you have a point.

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#63

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:41 AM UTC

cabalamat wrote: post #20

> The UTC rejected the proposals to add “external link sign”, most recently in L2/12-169. It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text Nor is Pile of Poo, and that's in Unicode. If external Link was added to Unicode, I expect it would be more used than 1000s of characters that are in it.

[deleted]

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#64

Post by webkike » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:42 AM UTC

Emojis are definitely plain text, as they have meaning when I write them on a piece of paper

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#65

Post by avianlyric » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:45 AM UTC

etrabroline wrote: post #25

cheschire wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar to case law in America, the committee might be avoiding potential abuse in future requests that point back to the rules being seemingly modified for one specific symbol.

If the rules are allowing U+1F4A9 and disallowing an actual symbol commonly used in text, they should change the rules.

Well U+1F4A9 exists because Japanese mobile operators modified their char sets to include emoji, and emoji has been part of Japanese culture for a long time.

Unicode aims to encode every character used for human communication in every culture, and Japan uses U+1F4A9.

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#66

Post by yoz-y » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:47 AM UTC

I'd like the condition on the plain text to be relaxed. I would love to be able to use Unicode for creating basic interfaces. I would love to have basic interface elements such as a magnifying glass, "save" icons and external link to be part of the standard. Maybe they don't strictly find their use but for one people would find the use if they were there, and two, there are already (granted, grandfathered) elements that were used exactly for this purpose back in the era of plain text window interfaces.

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#67

Post by joatmon-snoo » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:50 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #42

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…

This made me stop and think because I've never really wondered about what belongs and doesn't belong in Unicode, and then I went looking at what strange corners Unicode has and wow the "Miscellaneous Technical" code block is such a strange thing.

* It has APL symbols (checking the Wiki article on APL syntax and the APL standard, it seems that APL programs can be represented entirely in Unicode - which makes sense, but is still a little surprising).

* There's a benzene code point: ⌬

* "ERASE TO THE LEFT", better known as backspace, is a thing: ⌫

...and a little more bizarro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Technical

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#68

Post by clarry » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:51 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #30

jakeogh wrote: post #5

What's the code point for uppercase superscript Z? j/k there isnt one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... No doubt those emoji's are more important and historically common than superscript uppercase C F Q S X Y and Z. https://github.com/jakeogh/unicodehaz

I’m actually fairly annoyed that a lot of obvious superscripts, subscripts, and strikethroughs are missing.

I'm actually more annoyed that they are there in the first place. Unicode can't seem to decide whether it's about just encoding text or also doing presentation/formatting (and now piles of poo and colorful emoji, what next, animations?), so now it's a bit of both, what a mess. It's making life hard and breaking things for applications that assume text is just text, and the presentational features are not enough to avoid having to implement your own presentational features in a program that needs to do presentation..

now you have applications where you can't find a string because it was written in Unicode bold letters instead of the letters' normal ASCII counterparts. And then you have applications that are confused about those bold letters because they are not actually surrounded by bold markup.

The worst part is that you can't criticize unicode without attracting a crowd of bullies who handwave about human languages being complicated (no, that does not justify poor design) or say it has to be this way because ugh shift-jis (or whatever nasty old encoding you can come up with) is not nice.

Well designed technology makes complex things simple. People defending poorly designed technology blame the problem for being complex.

𝔽𝕦𝕔𝕜 𝕦𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕖!

(Why don't you try search for "fuck" in Firefox?)

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#69

Post by hunter2_ » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 8:53 AM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #21

> Furthermore, the existing widespread practice of representing this sign on web pages using images (often specified via CSS styles) would be unlikely to benefit from attempting to encode a character for this image. Obviously enough text-mode browsers would be likely to benefit.

I agree that text mode browsers would benefit, as they can hide the external nature of a URL behind non-URL link text, and not allow an image next to it.

But it seems that to be a codepoint, it needs to be useful in plain text scenarios. Text mode browsers which render links as discussed are not plain text.

Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)

#70

Post by hunter2_ » Thu, Apr 30, 2020, 9:02 AM UTC

dandellion wrote: post #44

golergka wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't expect to be able to click emoji, and they don't lose their meaning when printed out on paper.

If you print a web page the links are still there. The icon tells you "this here was a link" and you can go to the computer and look it up. If the link wasn't underlined and had a different colour but you printed in b&w it might be the only way to know that was a link, so I would argue that the icon is more useful in paper than on a live web, actually.

It's not for all links. It's for external links, meaning a different domain than what's currently in your address bar.