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Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

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Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#91

Post by Traubenfuchs »

shadowgovt wrote: post #50
jrockway wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess because the goal of Unicode is to be able to represent every character that's appeared in language. This one is in a published book, while guns and a sexual intercourse symbol aren't. Emoji was a weird value add that Japanese mobile providers added to their phones before Unicode. To get them to move to Unicode, they had to keep them. That's why there's a Tokyo Tower emoji, but not an Eiffel Tower. That's why…

I've even heard emoji referred to as "the carrot that keeps the implementations current." Every time a new version of Unicode is published, a few more emoji are tacked on. It acts as incentive for all the cellphone carriers and such to put the money into updating their implementations, because nobody wants to be the one on the block with the one phone that can't render "Mirror Ball" . (ETA: LOL, Hacker News drops "Mi…

I believe the majority of emoji do not work on hacker news.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#92

Post by layer8 »

jerf wrote: post #11

When my kids were young, I accidentally flubbed the pronunciation of "Santa Claus" once and said something that sounded a lot like "Centiclops", which I decided to roll with. Centiclops is a lot like a cyclops with one eye, except the as a reading of the roots clearly indicates, this is a creature with 100 eyes. Today I learn that Centiclops effectively has a Unicode character. As Centiclops' representative in the wo…

There should be a combining “eye” character so that you can have as many or few eyes as you like.

Though to be honest, that Unicode character looks more like a bunch of cells forming a tissue to me than eyes.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#93

Post by mkipper »

wheybags wrote: post #72

This kind of stupid thing is my problem with Unicode. We have all this baggage for stuff that nobody uses , and we need to deal with it forever. The worst for me is the way there is no possible way to encode a grapheme cluster as a constant size, so using Unicode make it impossible to have simple character access like an old style c string, no matter how big you make your char, even though it's totally possible with…

Before Unicode, everyone who came up with a character encoding scheme probably thought their system was good enough for any reasonable use-case. But they all had limitations that made them inadequate for things less obscure than representing some dead Mongolian language.

It would be nice if we could come up with some magical system that optimally encodes all the text that "matters" and ignores everything else, but history has shown that to be very hard. So we're left with Unicode, which takes the approach of giving us (effectively) infinite code points to represent characters, with (effectively) infinite ways to visually represent them. That does lead to a bunch of "unnecessary" baggage and headaches, but it also solves a bunch of real problems that you probably don't know exist.

Unicode is a pain in the ass, but it's a solution to a very hard problem. You can feel free to design your own solution, but you'll probably run head-first into all the problems Unicode was trying to solve from 40 years ago.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#94

Post by layer8 »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #41
koboll wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images. You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Be…

> Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able".

Only for characters from existing coded character sets.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#96

Post by bhk »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #41
koboll wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images. You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Be…

Cataloging every doodle ever drawn inline with text by anyone at any time in history would exhaust any finite set of code points.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#97

Post by BlueTemplar »

PeterisP wrote: post #53
koboll wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly it probably deserves the Pluto treatment: decertification as a character. One historical use in the 1400s doesn't merit a character and never did.

At the moment this character is used in many documents and databases - including comments in this thread, the article mentioned there, etc. There could have been a good case not to include it back in 2007, but once it has been included, excluding it would break stuff.

And updating it rather than adding a new, correct one, might make the current uses confusing ?

Speaking of which, do we have any similar hexagonal symbol ?

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#98

Post by thaumasiotes »

jerf wrote: post #11

When my kids were young, I accidentally flubbed the pronunciation of "Santa Claus" once and said something that sounded a lot like "Centiclops", which I decided to roll with. Centiclops is a lot like a cyclops with one eye, except the as a reading of the roots clearly indicates, this is a creature with 100 eyes. Today I learn that Centiclops effectively has a Unicode character. As Centiclops' representative in the wo…

> Centiclops is a lot like a cyclops with one eye, except th[at] as a reading of the roots clearly indicates, this is a creature with 100 eyes.

Not in any normal sense of "roots". Cent is a Latin root meaning 100. ops is a Greek form meaning eye. The -i- indicates that the word is being formed in Latin, and the -cl- is entirely spurious. The original Greek word divides as cycl-ops, not cy-clops.

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#99

Post by bzxcvbn »

fluoridation wrote: post #74
lucumo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rule-lawyering wise-asses try to mess with many policies. It's rarely a sensible indictment of a policy, nor is it very effective. Anyone dealing with such people just ignores them.

What's the criterion that includes the document in the tweet, but excludes the document referenced by the GP?

https://www.unicode.org/pending/proposals.html

https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_facto...

Re: Unicode character “ꙮ” (U+A66E) is being updated

#100

Post by jrockway »

shadowgovt wrote: post #50
jrockway wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess because the goal of Unicode is to be able to represent every character that's appeared in language. This one is in a published book, while guns and a sexual intercourse symbol aren't. Emoji was a weird value add that Japanese mobile providers added to their phones before Unicode. To get them to move to Unicode, they had to keep them. That's why there's a Tokyo Tower emoji, but not an Eiffel Tower. That's why…

I've even heard emoji referred to as "the carrot that keeps the implementations current." Every time a new version of Unicode is published, a few more emoji are tacked on. It acts as incentive for all the cellphone carriers and such to put the money into updating their implementations, because nobody wants to be the one on the block with the one phone that can't render "Mirror Ball" . (ETA: LOL, Hacker News drops "Mi…

Incidentally, Windows doesn't have the mirror ball. I guess it is a carrot to get me to upgrade to Windows 11, which I am skipping. (The key with Windows is to only use the good versions; XP, 7, 10, ???. Hoping ??? arrives soon ;)
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