Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 190 posts

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#51

Post by andyjohnson0 »

nextstep wrote: post #44
nsns wrote: post #37

And please make the up-vote button larger than the down-vote one. (They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)

How are they not logical opposites? Isn't an upvote exactly the opposite of a downvote?

Upvote = I like this. Downvote = This is noise/off-topic/abusive.

Thats the way it should work, and is part of what makes HN different to say Reddit. In reality, its becoming increasingly common for people to downvote something simply because they disagree with it.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#52

Post by toyg »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #46
hsmyers wrote: post #6

Excellent idea! Now if we could only convince w3C that the entire Unicode Symbol Set deserves names and not hex or octal then I'd be very happy indeed ♞ should be bnight and so on...

No, I don't think it's a problem. I believe HTML only had symbol names because of incompatible character sets, allowing Unicode characters in ASCII and other encodings. But modern text editors and sites can use Unicode symbols just fine, why avoid them?

You're so right, it hurts. Named entities are a hack from the past. Unicode does a better job at classifying the zillions of character across the world than any html-monkey ever will.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#54

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

toyg wrote: post #52
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't think it's a problem. I believe HTML only had symbol names because of incompatible character sets, allowing Unicode characters in ASCII and other encodings. But modern text editors and sites can use Unicode symbols just fine, why avoid them?

You're so right, it hurts. Named entities are a hack from the past. Unicode does a better job at classifying the zillions of character across the world than any html-monkey ever will.

A hack, but a wonderful one. Thanks to it, even latin-1 and us-ascii sites can use Unicode characters, even from user submitted content. Sure, it isn't as efficient as UTF-8, but it does the job.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#56

Post by gamzer »

nextstep wrote: post #44
nsns wrote: post #37

And please make the up-vote button larger than the down-vote one. (They're not really logical opposites and their use frequency is quite different.)

How are they not logical opposites? Isn't an upvote exactly the opposite of a downvote?

One could argue that an upvote is more often about agreement than a downvote is about disagreement.

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#57

Post by [deleted] »

lucian1900 wrote: post #41
jawr wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also zoom in to 125%, not sure if it's just me, but for a textual site the default font size seems too small. Maybe my eyes are just giving up. Out of curiosity, I was wondering why the triangle wasn't a CSS triangle.. wouldn't that be more efficient than a gif?

Not necessarily. The gif is requested once and cached, and then rendered once and cached. The CSS triangle would get rendered over and over again.

[deleted]

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#59

Post by [deleted] »

alx wrote: post #29
coderdude wrote: post #22

Using Unicode shapes and vector-based icons is a great step forward. They're not suitable for every use-case but for most purposes they work well. Lately I've been using Font Awesome[1] to a great extent. Is there a tool that lets you simulate what a site would look like on a high-DPI/Retina display? Is it simply enough to zoom the page in to get a feel for it? [1] http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/

Could you give us some use-cases where it's not suitable? Thanks :)

[deleted]

Re: HN: Please replace grayarrow.gif with Unicode character ▲

#60

Post by Yaggo »

hsmyers wrote: post #6

Excellent idea! Now if we could only convince w3C that the entire Unicode Symbol Set deserves names and not hex or octal then I'd be very happy indeed ♞ should be bnight and so on...

You can use the actual unicode symbol (on Mac, Edit -> Special characters) in html/css, no need for hex code. It isn't 1996 anymore.
Post reply on HN