This kind of reminded me of this I was reading this morning
http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/2020/04/allonomy-autonomy-and...
"a poem cannot 'contain in itself the reasons why it is so and not otherwise' (Coleridge) since it must be written on top of the infrastructure of a language and orthography that the poet rarely originates"
Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
11–20 of 210 posts
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#12It is simply factuly incorrect to say that a commonly used sysmbol would not benifit from being included in fonts. How can a committee working in this field posibly fail to understand that?
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#13> It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text, given the inevitable connection to its function in linking to other documents, and thus its coexistence with markup for links. Furthermore, the existing widespread practice of representing this sign on web pages using images (often specified via CSS styles) would be unlikely to benefit from attempting to encode a character for this imag…
I think that the point is, unlike emojis which have been integrated in end products by some vendors, forcing Unicode comity to integrate them due to the Unicode consortium goal of backward compatibility, this icon is enforced in any vendor charset out there.
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#14God, they spend so much time on emoji which is much the same. They are becoming a bit of a joke!
You don't expect to be able to click emoji, and they don't lose their meaning when printed out on paper.
Couldn't the URL be the print representation of the link symbol? Text can be represented differently in different media.
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#15It is simply factuly incorrect to say that a commonly used sysmbol would not benifit from being included in fonts. How can a committee working in this field posibly fail to understand that?
Similar to case law in America, the committee might be avoiding potential abuse in future requests that point back to the rules being seemingly modified for one specific symbol.
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#16The reason for rejection, for better or worse, is that this is a functional element, like a button, rather than part of running text.
That didn't stop the Unicode Consortium from including a left-pointing magnifying glass in the standard. I use this on my blog for the search button.
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#17The reason for rejection, for better or worse, is that this is a functional element, like a button, rather than part of running text.
Like the play/pause symbols then, which are already in there?
And since when was a smiling poop an ‘element of plain text’
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#18I think that most people find this hard to digest. The committee approves a ton of emojis with a dozen variations each, a gazillion characters that make it possible to make some weird word soup that breaks sane layout, but including one of the most commonly used symbols is somehow out of the question.
Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#19Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't expect to be able to click emoji, and they don't lose their meaning when printed out on paper.
Couldn't the URL be the print representation of the link symbol? Text can be represented differently in different media.
You can do this in CSS, but it's semantically different than an external link symbol.
@media print {
a::after{
content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
}
}Re: Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
#20> The UTC rejected the proposals to add “external link sign”, most recently in L2/12-169. It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text
Nor is Pile of Poo, and that's in Unicode.
If external Link was added to Unicode, I expect it would be more used than 1000s of characters that are in it.