101–110 of 111 posts
Really, it should have a full implementation of heraldry.
Unicode can only be complete when it is a full renderer. If I can't render my video game using one complete "glyph", what are we even doing in this world?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least this one isn't presented as a back and forth between two furry characters
Are you referring to a specific blogpost? Doesn't sound familiar.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rendering Unicode was always this complex. Emoji don't do anything that some other language in real use doesn't also do. What emoji does is bring that visually to the forefront among contemporary English text. The assumption that 8-bit character sets of simple bitmaps are all you need mostly only ever worked for English (and then only if you didn't need nice print-like typography, or math formulas, or…).
This isn't exactly true. Emojis and other symbols introduced new notions like colors that were not present before. I'm no longer certain that it is feasible to handcraft a font thwt contains all the symbols for codepoints affected by color modifiers. Also, 8 bit codepages, for all their problems (a different kind of hell), didn't break the assumption that each character is encoded as one byte. In that way, they didn'…
Color modifiers are just ZWJ sequences. Those existed before. The color modifiers themselves are not the most complicated things that get attached to ZWJ sequences among languages that Unicode supports.
OpenType today supports color tables that mean most emoji modified by colors aren't "handcrafted" but algorithmically constructed. (As many ligatures and other ZWJ sequences often are.)
> Also, 8 bit codepages, for all their problems (a different kind of hell), didn't break the assumption that each character is encoded as one byte.
That is broken in other 8-bit codepages as well, it was just seen as an exception/edge case rather than the rule. The big obvious exception has always been \r\n (carriage return then newline), but there's also ^H (control-H) and ^W (control-W) sequences (effectively backspace and delete word), and the entire gamut of things done with ANSI and/or VT100 escape seqences starting with Escape often stylized as ^[.
> And UTF-8 specifically gives the illusion to English speakers that using naive 8 bit string handling works.
Unless emoji are present, which is one of the great things about emoji and emoji becoming a very common form of punctuation in English text. Naive 8-bit string handling was always wrong. Emoji help make it visible how wrong it was. (In part by doing things other languages do such as ZWJ sequences and having code points out in the Astral Plane and other such features.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't exactly true. Emojis and other symbols introduced new notions like colors that were not present before. I'm no longer certain that it is feasible to handcraft a font thwt contains all the symbols for codepoints affected by color modifiers. Also, 8 bit codepages, for all their problems (a different kind of hell), didn't break the assumption that each character is encoded as one byte. In that way, they didn'…
> Emojis and other symbols introduced new notions like colors that were not present before. I'm no longer certain that it is feasible to handcraft a font thwt contains all the symbols for codepoints affected by color modifiers. Color modifiers are just ZWJ sequences. Those existed before. The color modifiers themselves are not the most complicated things that get attached to ZWJ sequences among languages that Unicode…
A bunch of control codes are historically part of character encodings, and their encoding is very consistent within codepages of the same family (ASCII/ANSI and EBCDIC). You don't have to have any awareness about the active codepage/language to handle them correctly.
Terminal escape sequences are a poor form of in-band signaling between devices (now virtualized), not text. I comsider that out of scope.
Anyway, as we get into the weeds here, I do not want to dispute the enormous practical utility of Unicode and I am glad that it exists and covers so many of the world's writing systems and alphabets. It is one of the central standards that connects people today. But from the purely technical perspective, the steady complexity creep is undeniable and brings somewhat hidden costs to software systems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
China really doesn't want to accept more flag emojis. For fairly obvious reasons.
" Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
And it isn't flamebait to point out the f*cked up power dynamics in highly-government-influenced standards orgs. Especially the Unicode Consortium, since you can fit the alphabets of the official language of every country but one into a 16-bit space (no I'm not advocating Han Unification -- in fact precisely the opposite). The whole rest of the world has to deal with variable-length encodings and "grapheme cluster" nonsense just to keep one country happy.
dang, you have impugned my honor. I demand satisfaction in the form of a duel! Nerf guns at twenty paces.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rendering Unicode was always this complex. Emoji don't do anything that some other language in real use doesn't also do. What emoji does is bring that visually to the forefront among contemporary English text. The assumption that 8-bit character sets of simple bitmaps are all you need mostly only ever worked for English (and then only if you didn't need nice print-like typography, or math formulas, or…).
This isn't exactly true. Emojis and other symbols introduced new notions like colors that were not present before. I'm no longer certain that it is feasible to handcraft a font thwt contains all the symbols for codepoints affected by color modifiers. Also, 8 bit codepages, for all their problems (a different kind of hell), didn't break the assumption that each character is encoded as one byte. In that way, they didn'…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
" Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is a thread about flag emojis, hardly tangential! And it isn't flamebait to point out the f*cked up power dynamics in highly-government-influenced standards orgs. Especially the Unicode Consortium, since you can fit the alphabets of the official language of every country but one into a 16-bit space (no I'm not advocating Han Unification -- in fact precisely the opposite). The whole rest of the world has to deal…
These tangents always go in the same direction, too: they bump the thread off the back road (obscure Unicode details!) and onto the well-paved multi-line highway (to hell!).
None of that matters though, if you're going to be as good-humored as this!