361–370 of 429 posts
The success of the unicodepowersymbol proposal inspired me to suggest a couple characters to Unicode (the Bitcoin sign and IBM's group mark from 1960s mainframes, which were accepted). The point is that Unicode really is open to proposals from random people; you don't need to part of a big company to influence Unicode.
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This is used in discussions of the character, would you not consider that text? it does seem to have a more figurative than literal reference than most characters, in a way that I am not sure how to translate into English.
Use of 囍 in discussions of the character 囍 can be reasonably considered nominal use (that is, use within a name). The use of a concrete object to directly represent itself isn't really the same thing as the use of language to refer to a concrete object. edit: I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about "it does seem to have a more figurative than literal reference than most characters, in a way that I am not sur…
http://www.chinatimes.com/newspapers/20160623000760-260115
In response to your edit, I mean that it has cultural resonance that is unusually strong in relation to its linguistic overtones, in many ways similar to the semantic timbre of a character like 福. The level of abstraction is different from English because of the ideographic nature of characters that means the visual appearance is emphasised, so the boundary that you pick out between reference and referent is more blurred.
I'm not really clear why exactly this character isn't more widely used in text, but I feel this might not be a bright dividing line from more common characters. I think inclusion of the the 福倒 is a harder case to make, but the examples I quoted elsewhere in this thread make me think it should be included. Perhaps not what you were hoping for in terms of elaboration, the problem is more conceptual fuzziness on my side perhaps than language of expression.
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That's a shame. Its one thing to have absolute, iron fisted control over your own platform - its another to intentionally seek to limit people's self expression on other platforms by influencing the standard in this way.
Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to have influence on what goes into Unicode? That doesn't make any sense. Also, if you read the article, Apple wasn't the only party in favor of nixing the emoji.
One might have a right to do something and yet be wrong to do it.
Apple had every right to do what they did, but they were completely, totally and undeniably in the wrong to do it. Everyone associated with their action should be ashamed. Honestly, they should all resign: their behaviour demonstrates that they have no business being associated with this sort of work.
I hope that ligatures will be more popularized than using characters like "½", because it is very difficult to find them in text with standard ASCII characters, i.e. in Firefox by typing 1/2 in quick find (ctrl+f).
I'm always wierded out by that, because it implies we should support the full gamut of math - superscripted/subscripted text, large fractions, the text above and below the epsilon in discrete sums, etc.
I always wondered what was wrong with the glyph "ON" to denote on.
That's not a glyph, but an English word. It would be perfectly appropriate in English-speaking countries. Not so much in the rest of the world.
And besides, languages the world over use plenty of words borrowed from English, and English itself is loaded with borrow words from other languages.
I've thought the mania for icons to replace common words since the Mac to be silly. Why is a picture of a Kleenex box more understandable than 'PRINT'? I have no idea what half the icons on my iPhone mean.
No way to google icons, either. I know, I'm supposed to learn them by pressing them to see what happens, but as someone who has learned not to learn how to operate machinery that way, I find it distasteful.
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Right, those should definitely be a part of Unicode. That's no excuse for emojis.
If you think of Unicode as a standard that enables the ease of exchange of textual data among parties, would that change your mind? People have been putting emojis alongside text (think SMS) long before Unicode put them into the standard at the request of Google and Apple.
You can exchange text with embedded icons just as easily without requiring OS vendors to come up with their own versions of vaguely-defined pictures by... simply embedding pictures.
I can already see the people on whatever would be the HN 20 years from now complaining how "bloated" Unicode is, full of thousands of symbols that no one ever uses, and calling to replace the whole thing, costing the industry even more money to replace a standard yet again.
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Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to have influence on what goes into Unicode? That doesn't make any sense. Also, if you read the article, Apple wasn't the only party in favor of nixing the emoji.
> Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to have influence on what goes into Unicode? One might have a right to do something and yet be wrong to do it. Apple had every right to do what they did, but they were completely, totally and undeniably in the wrong to do it. Everyone associated with their action should be ashamed. Honestly, they should all resign: their behaviour demonstrates th…
Also, if you think Apple was wrong, you must also think that Microsoft was (they voiced support), and everyone else at the meeting who agreed with the move. As the article says,
> Davis confirmed to BBC News on Monday that "there was consensus to remove" the emojis, but that he couldn't comment on the details.
So it's clearly not just Apple that thought this was the appropriate move.
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Sounds like 72 too many if you ask me. In all seriousness, I'm not sure emoji's really belong in text encoding. Even though it's more convenient, based on where they're most frequently used I don't think they need to be universal.
Your options are: 1) everybody uses them on their phones, they're in Unicode, consistent and compatible between devices and messaging programs. In the far flung future, researchers will be able to study their linguistic role in communication, confident in understanding what the characters were. 2) everybody uses them on their phones, they're proprietary fonts and codepoints (in the Unicode private use area if you're…
3) People who love colourful images will use stickers in Facebook Messenger, LINE, Viber, and soon iMessage. I'm sure WeChat has them too. It's basically like 2), except we've moved from proprietary codepoints to proprietary protocols.
I don't mind characters like and or even good old ︎ (which has always been too tiny for its own good). These work in black and white, in different artistic styles, and they're a fairly limited set.
But now we're going down the road where we get new stuff like tacos and unicorns every year. And even though Unicode is an industry standard, the pictures need to look like Apple's bitmaps to avoid confusion, and the Unicode standard changes so often that you have to manually keep track of who can already see and whose computer/phone/browser/messenger software is too old.
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Honestly, I think "SVG over UTF" makes a lot more sense. It's impossible to make a character set that supports every character known to man, because that just adds undue effort on every computer maker, ect, to keep up. So why don't we pick a very good set: perhaps every letter in every language in common use for the past 200 years? Then, for the oddball symbols that someone wants to mix in text, there can be some kin…
Because it's easier to throw in random icons than to actually accomplish the goal of "every letter in every language in common use for the past 200 years", or even "past 20 years". Or, put another way: 'We have an unambiguous, cross-platform way to represent “PILE OF POO” (), while we’re still debating which of the 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers deserve to spell their own names correctly.' https://modelviewcultu…
[1] http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2004/04252-khanda-ta-review.pdf
I got a change into Unicode 9.0 too! It was just a tweak to emoji characters to mark them all as East Asian Full Width instead of Narrow or Ambiguous so that they displayed correctly when using a fixed width font in a terminal console. This probably only matters if you like to use emoji filenames (you mad person), but it felt like a wart so I reported it & had a short back and forth with the chair of the emoji-relate…
It's not that I use emoji filenames, it's that I deal with real-world natural language text all the time, including at the console.
(In terms of compatibility, my text-justifying function is going to stop working correctly for the period of time between when gnome-terminal updates to Unicode 9 and when Python 3.x does. Still worth it.)