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U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

ionathan.ch

51–60 of 312 posts

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#51
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the days of people beginning to abuse ftp sites, all us admins shutting down our writable ftp upload folders, and thinking, "this is why we can't have nice things." It was the beginning of the end of the early, friendly internet.

I do not get it. Did you have to shut it down? Does not make sense to complain that someone uploaded stuff to a public unprotected writable storage. Wouldn't securing it with a set of credentials suffice?

Some were open for uploads by design, in spirit of sharing things - essentially use the free space left after maib purpose to provide friendly mirrors for things like new projects etc. I recall using Archie to find copies of open source software at the ending edge of that era.

Some also were used as submissions for projects, long before sites like sourceforge started. Especially since plonking a bigger source dump on newsgroups wasn't exactly well received.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#52
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we assume a signed int for available space Note that as it is currently defined, the Unicode codespace ranges from U+0000 to U+10FFFF, with some reserved codepoints (eg to encode surrogate pairs), yielding a total number of 1,112,064 assignable code points.

> as it is currently defined I find it completely implausible that this will ever change: the current size is baked in too heavily. • The abomination UTF-16, which is distressingly popular, cannot possibly support it. Replacing UTF-16 would be a massive upheaval in many ecosystems (e.g. JavaScript, Qt, Windows), and there’s no real prospect of most of those environments moving away from UTF-16, because it’s a massive…

No post body was provided.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#53

I still don't understand why Unicode has all these obscure symbols but they still haven't added all superscript/subscript numbers and letters https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6638471/why-does-the-uni... To quote a reply from the above StackOverflow thread: "So, they added a snowman with snow AND a snowman without snow , so that the weather forecaster of this world can avoid the dull snowflake , but we will never g…

> but they still haven't added all superscript/subscript numbers and letters

That would triple the size of Unicode.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#54

These unicode characters feel like they were given to us from an alien species or something. How did it we end up with so many characters of unknown origin? I had no idea what it meant or was used for, thus assigned it a “descriptive name” when collating the symbols for the STIX project. (I still have no idea, nor can supply an example of the symbol in use.) […] it is the case that ISO 9573-13 existed long before eit…

> Notably, it appears that anyone could register a glyph with the AFII for a fee of 5$ to 50$ (about 8.60$ to 86$, accounting for inflation). Even if the International Glyph Register can be found, it likely merely contains another table with the glyph, the indentifier, and the short description. To know its origins would require the original registration request that added the character, but it’s unlikely that such o…

In some sense, you can still do! The Ideographic Variation Database [1] essentially allows a definition of new CJK ideograph [sic] as a glyphic subset of existing characters, with a possible processing fee.

[1] https://unicode.org/ivd/

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#55
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember the days of people beginning to abuse ftp sites, all us admins shutting down our writable ftp upload folders, and thinking, "this is why we can't have nice things." It was the beginning of the end of the early, friendly internet.

I do not get it. Did you have to shut it down? Does not make sense to complain that someone uploaded stuff to a public unprotected writable storage. Wouldn't securing it with a set of credentials suffice?

Sometimes people should be able to do nice things without it getting abused, no?

In The Netherlands, in the nicer neighborhoods we have something called a ‘buurtbieb’ aka a ‘neighborhood libraries’, which is a weatherproof cabinet where people can put surplus books that other people in the neighborhood can borrow.

Of course you could take all the books or use the cabinet to store candy, but why would you?

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#56

I still don't understand why Unicode has all these obscure symbols but they still haven't added all superscript/subscript numbers and letters https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6638471/why-does-the-uni... To quote a reply from the above StackOverflow thread: "So, they added a snowman with snow AND a snowman without snow , so that the weather forecaster of this world can avoid the dull snowflake , but we will never g…

I don't understand, why Unicode must (should?) contain superscript and subscript glyphes at all. Declared goal of Unicode is to have encoding of all characters used by all languages, past and modern. Subscript and superscript are not used by any language as separate characters, it is typesetting property. It should be solved by other means, not by character/glyph encoding. Should Unicode include ALL characters strike…

This is probably an edge case, but I work in lab software that uses chemical symbols and having sub and super characters saves lots of headaches. I can just store "CO₂" in a database, query it, and display it back as a simple string, or display values in scientific notation like 1,3×10³, without having to use any formatting.

But to be honest I'm not sure what the parent comment wants to see added because at the moment having all the letters from A-Z, numbers from 0-9, and plus minus and equals signs as both subscript and superscript seems to be enough.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#57
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a cop out. You could equally say that new emojis shouldn't be added because you should use inline images for those. Or RTL markers shouldn't be added because you should use dedicated text styling for that. There are a ton of places that don't support superscript markup.

> You could equally say that new emojis shouldn't be added because you should use inline images for those. Well, that's really a better solution. Or a unicode character that allows you to set a pixel on a 256x256 grid and one to compose them. Strike that. Better not give anyone bad ideas.

Almost sounds like you reinvented DEC Sixel.

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#59
post #55
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not get it. Did you have to shut it down? Does not make sense to complain that someone uploaded stuff to a public unprotected writable storage. Wouldn't securing it with a set of credentials suffice?

Sometimes people should be able to do nice things without it getting abused, no? In The Netherlands, in the nicer neighborhoods we have something called a ‘buurtbieb’ aka a ‘neighborhood libraries’, which is a weatherproof cabinet where people can put surplus books that other people in the neighborhood can borrow. Of course you could take all the books or use the cabinet to store candy, but why would you?

We have these throughout many neighborhoods in my city in central Florida, USA. We’re a college town so I just assumed it was somehow connected to that. Neat that it’s an international thing!

Re: U+237C ⍼ Right Angle with Downwards Zigzag Arrow

#60

Might we run out of Unicode code points, like we (seem to) be running out of IPv4 addresses? As another comment mentions, once you add all these snowmen, with/without snow, male female and gender-neutral, in a few skin colour options (plus neutral)... it adds up. Plus, exponential growth once you consider family of snowmen (different number/genders/races of "parents", different number/gender/races of "children" and s…

I think the current approach is to just invent yet another "meta layer" of characters and declare that this particular sequence of bytes/codepoints/surrogate pairs/grapheme clusters/extended grapheme clusters/zwj sequences/whatever else you can think of has a special meaning and does not behave like you think it does. See also Henri Sivonen's essay on unicode string length [1]

So in a way, Unicode is already long past the time where you invent NATs and other hacks to buy you time with the scarcity problem.

[1] https://hsivonen.fi/string-length/

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