I want a tool that scans English 🗣 text for names of unicode symbols. Then I want the English language to move to that symbolic writing. You know, because it is fun to see cultures evolve.
Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
111–120 of 210 posts
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 o…
Unicode is full of whole blocks of weird sets of lines and borders. As far as I’m concerned adding the symbol just to make it easier to style links makes total sense.
Those "weird" characters has been used for ASCII and ANSI based text-mode user interfaces since the dawn of UI as a concept.
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#113I 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 find myself disagreeing with your agreement because of the examples of symbols that are clearly not text.
One of them, BROKEN CIRCLE WITH NORTHWEST ARROW, could actually be used for the external link symbol if it were mirrored!
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#114I 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 find myself disagreeing with your agreement because of the examples of symbols that are clearly not text. One of them, BROKEN CIRCLE WITH NORTHWEST ARROW, could actually be used for the external link symbol if it were mirrored!
In an RTL language, you don't even need to mirror it.
Or, to put it another way: if you think it needs to point to the right, is that because the text you read flows that way?
This then makes me wonder if the large portion of the world's population that read right-to-left find the currently widely-used external link symbol (as discussed in the article) a bit jarring.
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Should GUI icons, widgets and controls be covered by Unicode? That is a can of worms They already got all the Wingdings symbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings
Yeah because Wingdings was a preexisting character set and Unicode was designed to be a superset of all existing character sets in use.
Thus the inherent contradiction: Unicode is for text, it must include all existing character sets which it aims to unify, and previous character sets weren’t only used for text.
The obvious hack is to make a custom character set called “Rejected by Unicode”.
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You can put a URL into an SMS message, but you can't put an anchor tag (link) which is comprised of [a hidden URL and visible link text]. The latter is the only one of these that benefits from the symbol in question, because the external nature of the hidden URL is disguised. The former doesn't benefit because the external nature of the URL is obvious. Modern SMS readers will linkify the URL, but will set the visible…
> This explanation mirrors the rejection rationale: you don't need a symbol to be a Unicode character if the document is already rich text;
No, that's not the rejection rationale. The rejection rationale isn't about having access to image tags or CSS. It's about hypertext (click link, go to another text) vs having text (can't click link, no other text). If that was the rationale, they wouldn't allow emojis in unicode, because you could insert them as images.
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unicode is full of whole blocks of weird sets of lines and borders. As far as I’m concerned adding the symbol just to make it easier to style links makes total sense.
Those "weird" characters has been used for ASCII and ANSI based text-mode user interfaces since the dawn of UI as a concept.
Unicode’s box drawing seems to go way beyond ANSI, though, and PETscii was only added very recently (IIRC).
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#118How many new characters are proposed each year? What’s the rejection rate? Maybe it’s a healthy process to reject when uncertain and then reconsider after popular appeals, especially if they are inundated with (mostly) questionable applications. It’s premature to judge the process without more context
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#119The closest I can think of is U+2b00 (north east white arrow) followed by U+20de (combining enclosing square). I suspect HN will eat the character: ⬀⃞ although they sometimes pass through if there's enough other text in the comment.
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 ⌛🀄🈚
could be because emoji are in the 'Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs' Unicode block, but the hourglass symbol is in 'Miscellaneous Technical', so it doesn't count as an emoji according to HN's filter
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find myself disagreeing with your agreement because of the examples of symbols that are clearly not text. One of them, BROKEN CIRCLE WITH NORTHWEST ARROW, could actually be used for the external link symbol if it were mirrored!
In an RTL language, you don't even need to mirror it. Or, to put it another way: if you think it needs to point to the right, is that because the text you read flows that way? This then makes me wonder if the large portion of the world's population that read right-to-left find the currently widely-used external link symbol (as discussed in the article) a bit jarring.
> makes me wonder if the large portion of the world's population that read right-to-left find the currently widely-used external link symbol (as discussed in the article) a bit jarring
The symbol appears mirrored in RTL languages on Wikipedia, e.g. this random Arabic article: https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D8%B3%D9%86...