This is the 2nd dupe on the frontpage for today.
Should HN do some URL normalization?
The dupe about the SSD had an extra trailing slash, and here it is the usual problem with blogspot.com vs blogspot.<countrycode>.
Oh, I'm sure that someone in denotational semantics will use it for something... :-)
(Twice having tried to learn DS, thinking it would be "good for me", only to rage quit after running into the next half dozen undefined hieroglyphics...)
This is a reversed form of the
preceding Unicode symbol
located at U+1F543 (proposed
location): . This symbol is used
on right-hand pages to denote an
Orthodox Lower Rank feast. As
well, this symbol can be used to
denote one of the two lower rank
feasts in black-and-white printing.
> Why is there no codepoint for GREEK SUBSCRIPT SMALL LETTER ALPHA?
Could it be that (quoted from that Wikipedia page): The World Wide Web Consortium and the Unicode Consortium have made recommendations on the choice between using markup and using superscript and subscript characters: "When used in mathematical context (MathML) it is recommended to consistently use style markup for superscripts and subscripts."
Inconsistency remains though, since the Unicode standard defines characters for full superscript Latin lowercase alphabet except q, a limited uppercase Latin alphabet, a few subscripted lowercase letters, and some Greek letters.
Unicode is not about what you would like to use, but about what has been used in the past. New characters are avoid as much as possible and old characters are allocated a codepoint only if you can show that they have been extensively used and that they are really different from other similarly looking glyphs that already have a codepoint.
Probably nobody has found enough small alphas used in subscripts and there were no electronic encodings that included it so it has never been considered for inclusion.
It is kind of a mess though. Maybe it would have been better if they had named the repurposed glyphs like LATERAL POSTVELAR CONSONANT, but that's not generally how Unicode does things.
I don't think emoji are logograms. Logograms represent actual words in a language, as opposed to emoji which don't have a conventional mapping to words (unless you consider the unicode character names such mappings, which is odd since most users don't have any idea what the character names are).
You're right, but at the same time the level of abstraction it offers over spoken language is one of the reasons for the historic success of logographic writing. For example, in Chinese history it allowed mutually unintelligible dialects to more easily exchange information in writing, and it isolated orthography from shifts in pronunciation to a greater degree than possible with phonographic scripts. I feel like emoji have some similar properties along these lines, but of course also their own set of problems (specific visualizations can become dated, for example).
A fair bunch of Chinese characters are also actually pictographic (they're an image of something) or ideographic (they represent an abstract idea, not a morpheme or word) in origin, if not current usage.
This stuff - synergies and conflicts between writing systems and various media - fascinates me. Chinese writing for example now suffers from the problem that if your medium doesn't allow free-form painting/graphical compositing (like our computers largely don't right now) you can't easily coin new logograms, since you need a central registry that's slow to distribute to leaf nodes (cf. Unicode). So what's happening now is that new words get coined by recombining existing characters based on their sound value, adding a phonographic layer on top. And of course inputting Chinese has also become dependent on auxiliary systems like pinyin-based IMEs.
Meanwhile, the Korean Hangul alphabet has the interesting property that some of the letters graphically derive from each other with consistent patterns of "take this, add a stroke and you get this", making it easier to design keyboards with reduced numbers of buttons to enter combos. There's the theory that this contributed to the success of texting/mobile in Korea, and is a contributing reason for the healthy mobile industry there.
I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation.
> I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation.
Except that emoji aren't a writing system. Writing systems encode language. Emoji encode emotions, perhaps, or suggest collections of ideas/emotions, but don't convey language per se because there's no conventionally defined correspondence between words in a language and a given emoji.
If I give you a string in English or Chinese or Arabic or Amharic, using the conventional writing systems for those languages, each string will be interoperable as a specific sequence of words in that language. A string of emoji doesn't work that way.
Are you suggesting we turn falling into a specific set of relationships between symbols an entry requirement for the Unicode database, though? How would that look like in practice? I agree you're highlighting a useful difference, but I'm not sure about implications.
Nah, I think keeping unicode as "characters" is fine. It's perfectly reasonable to encode non-linguistic data as characters if they're using in such wise.
Edit: to circle back, you said:
How are emoji different from other logograms?
and everything thereafter was pointless pedantry on my part. Sorry for wasting valuable minutes of your life.
No waste at all, you raised a good point :). Emoji are technically ideograms, not logograms ... though some of the Han characters are ideographic in origin/conception too (and then you get into cool things like compound ideograms), they just didn't stay purely ideographic.
I don't even understand your question. How is a character of a normal language (and i consider chinese normal) different from the picture of crap?
And why would we put up a huge library of tiny pictures? If i want to look at cat pics, i don't open up the font browser.
And where is the HN-logo unicode point?
Can i register my own somewhere?
Unicode should be used to represent language and not anti-piracy symbols or poo or snowmen. Just my opinion, though. Obviously a great many people like shit in their fonts.
So what about all the characters in Unicode that map to different phonemes or words in different languages? For example, Latin letters are sometimes used for different phonemes in different languages (and dialects, and applications like romanization), and Han logograms are sometimes used for different words/morphemes in different languages. How is that different from "picture of crap" mapping to different specific words/phrases in different languages? You can certainly point at a picture of a pile of crap and name it in many normal languages.
But wait - what's a "normal language" and what's a normal graphical representation of it? Is it down to the development process? A lot of writing systems were originally designed/agreed upon by small groups of people, too, for example.
My questions (and other comments in this subthread) aim to get you to think more abstractly about the problem space and define your beef more accurately, because I'm interested in this question (where should Unicode draw the line) as well. Let's brainstorm, basically.
The distinction between normal language and graphical representation is the same as what is clipart and what is a official part of a language. Is poo a letter? No. Is A a letter? Yes.
Fonts are not a clipart gallery and not a place for some committee to dump little pictures. If you want to show me a snowmen over the internet, use an image! Certainly people can understand an image of a snowmen.
But 粪 is also a character and means poo as well. It might not look like poo to you, but there's also examples of pictograms in the same script: 田 means field and looks like one.
Of course these are "official part of a language". But why? Under whose authority? You could cite "actual usage", but many of the emoji in Unicode certainly have seen actual usage for 10+ years in East Asia, so they qualify. And many of the letters in Unicode were in fact designed by committee prior to mass adoption by an actual population (for example the Hangul alphabet), so a lot of scripts already in Unicode originally didn't meet that barrier.
* = Letters vs. characters: Elements of alphabets are referred to as letters. Alphabets are graphical representations of phonemes, but many other writing systems encode syllables (syllabaries, like the Japanese kana), morphemes or words (logographies) instead. Unicode contains examples of all of these, and thus not just letters. So we want to talk about characters instead.
For the record, the example was a Chinese character, which qualifies as "normal" according to the rulebook you set up. It's in active use in Mandarin and Japanese, and I'd think recognizable to many others (e.g. Cantonese readers or Koreans and Vietnamese). And it'll certainly show just fine on the default installs of most systems on the market right now.
The point is that it will never happen that all codepoints are available everywhere (every font, evers OS, every device), and i certainly don't want a gazillion of pictures loaded on my smartphones little memory, just because some people think it necessary to have a symbol for poop in fonts which is never used anyway. I even consider it a total waste in my laptops 16GB of memory, to be honest. It's not a waste when it serves the real purpose of a language. A chinese word for poop? Sure. A picture of actual poop? No.
And where does it stop? Can i have some dog poop and cat poop codepoints please? I'm sure elephant poop looks very different to cat poop, i want a code point for that too.
I say it again: If you want pictures and cliparts, use .png. If you want to write actual text, use fonts. It's as simple as that.
Which only shows that you know nothing.
A unicode font can come in at about 20MB, but let's add more tiny pictures and make it 100MB, so that i can see the snowman on your webpage (which would be probably 2-5 kB as png).
Why should my browser load thousands of pictures that are never used?!
> A unicode font can come in at about 20MB, but let's add more tiny pictures and make it 100MB
You're pulling numbers out of your ass. You also clearly don't know how font fallbacks work, despite having been told how they work in this very thread. Several times.
And you clearly don't understand that a) this thread contains unicode that my browser still doesn't show, despite your magic fallback and b) the fonts stil contain garbage that has nothing to do with fonts.
So you're using Windows XP or something similarly mired in the 90s which doesn't have fonts installed with glyphs for a standard character. That's bad for you and a small number of other people but that hardly says it's not useful to the billion or so people who can read Chinese.
The nice part about having it Unicode is that if you copy and paste that character somewhere else, it'll still work. It never goes through what we used to have to deal where the same character value couldn't reliably be processed without knowing the intended encoding with certainty.
There is a good case for adding ancient languages to Unicode. I can also see the case for adding smiley faces, which could be seen as a contemporary global language. But I fail to see the case for pictures of poop, pizza and cowbell. That just seems a bit random to me. Maybe everyone is drawing the line somewhere else, but I'm guessing most people don't want to go down the road of adding company logo's for Coca-Cola and McDonalds or pictures of the Americans presidents or the sigils from Game of Thrones. It's good that Unicode is extendable and all, but that doesn't mean we should be adding glyphs just for the sake of it.
Also, adding political glyphs is a sure way to ruin the universality of Unicode (I'm looking at you no-piracy).
All that said, I love Unicode, it has flaws but I think it's brilliant (no sarcasm).
Also, can't wait to actually use the man-in-business-suit-levitating-glyph (sarcasm).
I'd use the Unicode sarcasm marks, but your font probably doesn't support them yet...
Because it's waste. Because if not every font implements it, what is the usefulness of it? Did you ever visit websites that use glyphs your font doesn't know?
How would you use those pictures on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the picture, because it may be implemented differently or not at all.
It just looks like a big waste for no good reason.
> Because if not every font implements it, what is the usefulness of it?
Most fonts only implements a fraction of unicode, is unicode a waste? Is cyrillic in unicode a waste? Is Cherokee? Braille symbols? Buginese and Meroitic cursive?
> Did you ever visit websites that use glyphs your font doesn't know?
Yes? The software will fall back on a font which does provide the glyphs, or display a block with the codepoint if it doesn't have any.
> How would you use those pictures on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the picture, because it may be implemented differently or not at all.
How would you use letters on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the letters, because it may be implemented differently or not at all?
Not only that, but unicode is not specific to websites for fuck's sake, not only will somebody find a use for them on websites even if you can't, somebody will definitely find a use for them outside of websites. Most (or all?) of the new emoji are inherited from windings[0] and webdings[1], they don't come out of nowhere.
> It just looks like a big waste for no good reason.
For instance a waste of time of font designers; you can make rational decision about including certain alphabets (by analysing the target group demands), but selecting a reasonable subset of bazyllion random, singular pictures to draw and test is a major headache. Obviously this way the users get inconsistent experience.
> selecting a reasonable subset of bazyllion random, singular pictures to draw and test is a major headache.
Right, because there[0] were[1] no[2] "bazyllion[3] random[4], singular[5] pictures[6] to[7] draw[8] and[9] test[10]" dating back to Unicode 1.0[11] before and Unicode 7.0 changes everything.
> Did you ever visit websites that use glyphs your font doesn't know?
Other comments have touched on this already, but I want to substantiate with additional information: In practice, fonts that cover many different writing systems at once are relatively rare. Your typical Western font will focus on Latin with varying coverage of descendants (like the Portuguese and Vietnamese alphabets) and perhaps expand to cover Cyrillic, but not more. Conversely, it's rare for a font by a Korean foundry to have equivalent Latin/Cyrillic coverage next to its native Hangul alphabet.
There's plenty of documents that mix these writing systems, though. I do in fact visit websites that aren't covered by any one font in my browser's default settings or any one family named in the site's markup/CSS all the time, and you probably do too.
Hence the font stacks on all relevant platforms perform glyph substitution: If font X doesn't contain a glyph, it'll go looking for a font Y that does and drop that glyph in. Many platforms allow you to manipulate substitution preference e.g. by defining aliases for font families.
I had the exact same question pop up in my mind after seeing the emoji's. I understand all characters can be considered nothing but pictures, but a thermometer, really? Is this used in any widespread language to be of significance to Unicode? Is Unicode trying to also offer some kind of clipart capability?
I think we've seen our fair share of derailed projects in IT. Unicode is certainly a very critical project, which makes its focus even more important.
Unicode contains a wide range of different scripts.
For example, some are phonographic (the letters represent phonemes, i.e. speech sounds), others are logographic (the letters represent words, or morphemes).
Both of these can be featural: The Korean Hangul script is phonographic, but the letter shapes are not arbitrary. Some of them are visualizations of mouth shape or tongue position when producing the sound. For example the velar consonant ㄱ (somewhere inbetween the English g and k, roughly) is the tongue position as seen from the side.
A logogram can also be featural, i.e. it can look like the thing it represents. This would be the case for a glyph that means "thermometer" and looks to viewers like a thermometer. It could also be arbitrary - some shape that you just agree on to mean thermometer. Perhaps sharing some graphical aspects with topically related logograms.
They're all just spots on a spectrum.
(Edit: I briefly touched on pictograms vs. ideograms a bit more down below.)
That's amusing, because I looked at the thermometer, and thought, oh that's good, I can use that. But a chilli pepper, do we really need a character for a chilli pepper? So to answer your question, unicode is trying to bridge the gap in communication that offers a language independent set of recognizable glyphs that can be used to communicate. And one mans chilli pepper is another mans thermometer.
Is the thermometer symbol used widely? No idea. Is emoji used widely? Yes, In Japan 🇯🇵 (and Korea? 🇰🇷) and has been for > 15 years. A common email/msg composed by a Japanese woman 👧 age 15 to 35 uses many emoji.
I realize this message will not render correctly in Chrome because Chrome, at least Desktop Chrome, does not yet support emoji 😭
Is the problem with Chrome or the OS and font selection? I think everything renders on my Win 7 + FX 30 setup I'm using now. Generally, I have the best success with Win 8 + IE 11.
It won't. Those custom fonts you speak about not only use characters which aren't, and never would be in the unicode database (such as trademarked logos), but also draw from the private unicode blocks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas
Which means there's no sanely written font that would use a "t" for an icon. Wingdings is not a sanely written font.
That's not really the right question. We already have small pictures in fonts, just look at Wingdings or Webdings. Unicode is just assigning them to unique code points so they can be represented in a document without requiring the font to be specified.
Never said that, but the current situation is that we have glyphs that people are using in documents that can't be represented in Unicode, and that's pretty much the main reason there are Unicode revisions in the first place.
Why would documents using Webdings stop working today? I'm pretty sure they still work. That's a lame excuse. Considering your point, wouldn't it have been the chance to clean up this mess with unicode instead of piling up shitty icons in a standard?
They are in Unicode for compatibility with other encodings, to make it easier to switch to Unicode. Most of the emoji comes from Japanese mobile phone carriers or fonts like Wingdings.
You might not need them but consider this for a moment:
When I was a kid, there was a boy in my class who was mute. He carried a chalkboard and flashcards to facilitate communication. Eventually, he was chosen to pilot a device that was sort of like a keyboard with oversized keys. Each key had a pictograph on it[0].
Wouldn't it be nice for him if the flashcards and keyboard device had a consistent set of characters that were easily recognizable not only by him but by the people with whom he was communicating?
Now, would he ever need "MAN IN SUIT LEVITATING"? Probably not (you never know!) but I'm glad there is a standard set of otherwise useful pictographs for people like him.
[0] - I'm in my late 20s but this was when few families owned computers, let alone super-helpful handheld devices. Also worth mentioning that this boy knew ASL but attended a regular public school where few students and faculty could so the chalkboard and flashcards were infinitely more practical.
And that device would have a keyboard with thousands of keys?
Btw. that device exists today, and it's called a tablet. I'm pretty sure i have seen stuff exactly like that and it serves a great purpose.
The consistent set of "characters" (pictures in this case) would still look very different on each device or application that uses another font. Because a banana in one font could look very different in another font. The only thing that actually would be consistent if the content he uses would use actual pictures! (A website displaying a banana on his touchpad can look different on his laptop, can't it?).
Technically the entirety of the unicode range is supported by browsers right now -- they just don't exist in fonts at all. What Unicode does is say that "this codepoint" means "this". At that point, fonts start adding glyphs to mean "this" and authors start adding codepoints that refer to "this".
If you look at FontAwesome, it uses characters in the "unicode private use area" -- which are effectively undefined -- but putting those codepoints in your HTML document while having the appropriate font loaded will show the appropriate icon glyphs.
Chrome does support these codepoints, but it doesn't support the format of Apple's PNG glyphs for emoji. Amusingly, it does support the android colored glyphs in Chrome for Android.
No, fonts ship with them. Browsers don't really care, they see codepoints and ask underlying font-rendering API for the corresponding glyphs, then display that.
And these characters may not have anything to do with browsers, not are they restricted to browsers e.g. "emoji" originate in pre-smartphones cellphone-based text and email messages in japan for instance.
a) Ireland recommends adding the following new characters to this table:
1F597 REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED
1F598 RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS
Love the uk's understated battle with the US over Latin letter middle dot. Man in business suit levitating is another great character. Amazing that this is someone's job.
Note that these glyphs will appear as boxes until font designers get around to adding them to their fonts.
You can have fun with this. Say you're disillusioned with your current job and planning to leave within the year. Insert these into whatever important document you're working on at the time, e.g. as bullet points or decoration around titles. Sometime after you leave, they'll reveal their true nature. A sort of "FU" time-bomb.
Nice, but how freaking long is it going to take to get this to show up in software anywhere? We can't currently reliably use a large swath of interesting glyphs in the current version.
Everybody's talking about new glyphs/codepoints, but unicode is actually way more than a list of codepoints.
Note the announcement also includes:
* Changes to the unicode collation algorithm for locale-dependent sorting (I haven't figured out what htey are yet)
* New character properties and values, used for case-changing and line-breaking behavior (i think line-breaking might be locale-dependent too).
* some other stuff
The unicode algorithms for _doing things_ with text in appropriate ways are actually way more mind-blowing to me than just the directory of glyphs. When you start thinking about it and get into the weeds and realize how other languages work very differently than English with regard to some of this stuff -- proper "uppercase" or "sort" or "are these two strings semantically the same" across the global universe of glpyhs -- is _really_ challenging, and unicode does a pretty amazing job of it.
It's sadly way more confusing to figure out if/when the unicode library of your choice has been updated to use unicode 7.0 (or even 6.0) text algorithms and full character database with properties, rather than to figure out if a given font includes the new glpyh or whatever.
87 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] threadhttps://twitter.com/xor/status/478797422496215040/photo/1
edit: Found elsewhere
>[...] another new character (#1F571) depicts the familiar skull and crossbones. It is labeled “skull and crossbones” too – no “Yes to Piracy” here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings#mediaviewer/File:Webdi... (top row, 3rd character)
Edit: Nope. http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2150.pdf
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.perl5.porters/2014/06/ms...
I'm not sure I want to know what this would be used for.
(Twice having tried to learn DS, thinking it would be "good for me", only to rage quit after running into the next half dozen undefined hieroglyphics...)
http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10395-typikon.pdf
Why, for the love of Zeus, is there no codepoint for
Am I missing something? Why should I never want to subscript α? I know a few physicists who gladly would.It doesn't end there, see the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... which sports a consolidated overview.
Tell me I'm overlooking something very obvious.
Could it be that (quoted from that Wikipedia page): The World Wide Web Consortium and the Unicode Consortium have made recommendations on the choice between using markup and using superscript and subscript characters: "When used in mathematical context (MathML) it is recommended to consistently use style markup for superscripts and subscripts."
Inconsistency remains though, since the Unicode standard defines characters for full superscript Latin lowercase alphabet except q, a limited uppercase Latin alphabet, a few subscripted lowercase letters, and some Greek letters.
Probably nobody has found enough small alphas used in subscripts and there were no electronic encodings that included it so it has never been considered for inclusion.
Here's where they argued that they needed subscript versions, rather than using the existing greek letters with a modifier: http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n2442.pdf
It is kind of a mess though. Maybe it would have been better if they had named the repurposed glyphs like LATERAL POSTVELAR CONSONANT, but that's not generally how Unicode does things.
A fair bunch of Chinese characters are also actually pictographic (they're an image of something) or ideographic (they represent an abstract idea, not a morpheme or word) in origin, if not current usage.
This stuff - synergies and conflicts between writing systems and various media - fascinates me. Chinese writing for example now suffers from the problem that if your medium doesn't allow free-form painting/graphical compositing (like our computers largely don't right now) you can't easily coin new logograms, since you need a central registry that's slow to distribute to leaf nodes (cf. Unicode). So what's happening now is that new words get coined by recombining existing characters based on their sound value, adding a phonographic layer on top. And of course inputting Chinese has also become dependent on auxiliary systems like pinyin-based IMEs.
Meanwhile, the Korean Hangul alphabet has the interesting property that some of the letters graphically derive from each other with consistent patterns of "take this, add a stroke and you get this", making it easier to design keyboards with reduced numbers of buttons to enter combos. There's the theory that this contributed to the success of texting/mobile in Korea, and is a contributing reason for the healthy mobile industry there.
I'm getting far from the original topic with this rambling, but it still reads on it in one sense: There's a lot of variety to writing systems, and it's worth thinking about emoji as a spot on the spectrum instead of in isolation.
Except that emoji aren't a writing system. Writing systems encode language. Emoji encode emotions, perhaps, or suggest collections of ideas/emotions, but don't convey language per se because there's no conventionally defined correspondence between words in a language and a given emoji.
If I give you a string in English or Chinese or Arabic or Amharic, using the conventional writing systems for those languages, each string will be interoperable as a specific sequence of words in that language. A string of emoji doesn't work that way.
Edit: to circle back, you said:
and everything thereafter was pointless pedantry on my part. Sorry for wasting valuable minutes of your life.Unicode should be used to represent language and not anti-piracy symbols or poo or snowmen. Just my opinion, though. Obviously a great many people like shit in their fonts.
But wait - what's a "normal language" and what's a normal graphical representation of it? Is it down to the development process? A lot of writing systems were originally designed/agreed upon by small groups of people, too, for example.
My questions (and other comments in this subthread) aim to get you to think more abstractly about the problem space and define your beef more accurately, because I'm interested in this question (where should Unicode draw the line) as well. Let's brainstorm, basically.
Fonts are not a clipart gallery and not a place for some committee to dump little pictures. If you want to show me a snowmen over the internet, use an image! Certainly people can understand an image of a snowmen.
Of course these are "official part of a language". But why? Under whose authority? You could cite "actual usage", but many of the emoji in Unicode certainly have seen actual usage for 10+ years in East Asia, so they qualify. And many of the letters in Unicode were in fact designed by committee prior to mass adoption by an actual population (for example the Hangul alphabet), so a lot of scripts already in Unicode originally didn't meet that barrier.
* = Letters vs. characters: Elements of alphabets are referred to as letters. Alphabets are graphical representations of phonemes, but many other writing systems encode syllables (syllabaries, like the Japanese kana), morphemes or words (logographies) instead. Unicode contains examples of all of these, and thus not just letters. So we want to talk about characters instead.
That's pretty much my point.
http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=7C...
You're just being petty or culturally arrogant at this point, TBH.
I say it again: If you want pictures and cliparts, use .png. If you want to write actual text, use fonts. It's as simple as that.
Why should my browser load thousands of pictures that are never used?!
Yes, it's ridiculous.
You're pulling numbers out of your ass. You also clearly don't know how font fallbacks work, despite having been told how they work in this very thread. Several times.
And you clearly don't understand that a) this thread contains unicode that my browser still doesn't show, despite your magic fallback and b) the fonts stil contain garbage that has nothing to do with fonts.
The nice part about having it Unicode is that if you copy and paste that character somewhere else, it'll still work. It never goes through what we used to have to deal where the same character value couldn't reliably be processed without knowing the intended encoding with certainty.
Also, adding political glyphs is a sure way to ruin the universality of Unicode (I'm looking at you no-piracy).
All that said, I love Unicode, it has flaws but I think it's brilliant (no sarcasm).
Also, can't wait to actually use the man-in-business-suit-levitating-glyph (sarcasm).
I'd use the Unicode sarcasm marks, but your font probably doesn't support them yet...
As someone else pointed out, it comes from Wingdings, for which there has been an effort to fully get into Unicode.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings#mediaviewer/File:Webd...
You'd probably only have one or two installed that have the emoji characters.
It just looks like a big waste for no good reason.
Waste of what?
> Because if not every font implements it, what is the usefulness of it?
Most fonts only implements a fraction of unicode, is unicode a waste? Is cyrillic in unicode a waste? Is Cherokee? Braille symbols? Buginese and Meroitic cursive?
> Did you ever visit websites that use glyphs your font doesn't know?
Yes? The software will fall back on a font which does provide the glyphs, or display a block with the codepoint if it doesn't have any.
> How would you use those pictures on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the picture, because it may be implemented differently or not at all.
How would you use letters on a website, when you can't even guarantee the style of the letters, because it may be implemented differently or not at all?
Not only that, but unicode is not specific to websites for fuck's sake, not only will somebody find a use for them on websites even if you can't, somebody will definitely find a use for them outside of websites. Most (or all?) of the new emoji are inherited from windings[0] and webdings[1], they don't come out of nowhere.
> It just looks like a big waste for no good reason.
Again, a big waste of what?
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wingdings
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webdings
No more so than right now.
> selecting a reasonable subset of bazyllion random, singular pictures to draw and test is a major headache.
Right, because there[0] were[1] no[2] "bazyllion[3] random[4], singular[5] pictures[6] to[7] draw[8] and[9] test[10]" dating back to Unicode 1.0[11] before and Unicode 7.0 changes everything.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_alphanumeric_symbo...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong#Unicode
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominoes#Dominoes_in_Unicode
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_Cards_(Unicode_block)
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_Symbols_(Unicode_block)
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_(symbol)#Arrows_in_Unicod...
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Character_Recognition_(...
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_Shapes
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_Dingbats
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_Extensions
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscellaneous_Technical_(Unicod...
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Drawing_(Unicode_block)
Other comments have touched on this already, but I want to substantiate with additional information: In practice, fonts that cover many different writing systems at once are relatively rare. Your typical Western font will focus on Latin with varying coverage of descendants (like the Portuguese and Vietnamese alphabets) and perhaps expand to cover Cyrillic, but not more. Conversely, it's rare for a font by a Korean foundry to have equivalent Latin/Cyrillic coverage next to its native Hangul alphabet.
There's plenty of documents that mix these writing systems, though. I do in fact visit websites that aren't covered by any one font in my browser's default settings or any one family named in the site's markup/CSS all the time, and you probably do too.
Hence the font stacks on all relevant platforms perform glyph substitution: If font X doesn't contain a glyph, it'll go looking for a font Y that does and drop that glyph in. Many platforms allow you to manipulate substitution preference e.g. by defining aliases for font families.
I think we've seen our fair share of derailed projects in IT. Unicode is certainly a very critical project, which makes its focus even more important.
For example, some are phonographic (the letters represent phonemes, i.e. speech sounds), others are logographic (the letters represent words, or morphemes).
Both of these can be featural: The Korean Hangul script is phonographic, but the letter shapes are not arbitrary. Some of them are visualizations of mouth shape or tongue position when producing the sound. For example the velar consonant ㄱ (somewhere inbetween the English g and k, roughly) is the tongue position as seen from the side.
A logogram can also be featural, i.e. it can look like the thing it represents. This would be the case for a glyph that means "thermometer" and looks to viewers like a thermometer. It could also be arbitrary - some shape that you just agree on to mean thermometer. Perhaps sharing some graphical aspects with topically related logograms.
They're all just spots on a spectrum.
(Edit: I briefly touched on pictograms vs. ideograms a bit more down below.)
I realize this message will not render correctly in Chrome because Chrome, at least Desktop Chrome, does not yet support emoji 😭
Which means there's no sanely written font that would use a "t" for an icon. Wingdings is not a sanely written font.
So, for the sake of interoperability and the ability to read back these documents in a future Unicode-only world, we have to encode them.
When I was a kid, there was a boy in my class who was mute. He carried a chalkboard and flashcards to facilitate communication. Eventually, he was chosen to pilot a device that was sort of like a keyboard with oversized keys. Each key had a pictograph on it[0].
Wouldn't it be nice for him if the flashcards and keyboard device had a consistent set of characters that were easily recognizable not only by him but by the people with whom he was communicating?
Now, would he ever need "MAN IN SUIT LEVITATING"? Probably not (you never know!) but I'm glad there is a standard set of otherwise useful pictographs for people like him.
[0] - I'm in my late 20s but this was when few families owned computers, let alone super-helpful handheld devices. Also worth mentioning that this boy knew ASL but attended a regular public school where few students and faculty could so the chalkboard and flashcards were infinitely more practical.
Btw. that device exists today, and it's called a tablet. I'm pretty sure i have seen stuff exactly like that and it serves a great purpose.
The consistent set of "characters" (pictures in this case) would still look very different on each device or application that uses another font. Because a banana in one font could look very different in another font. The only thing that actually would be consistent if the content he uses would use actual pictures! (A website displaying a banana on his touchpad can look different on his laptop, can't it?).
Don't they realize how much of 1990s music history is unwritable thanks to this glaring omission?
If you look at FontAwesome, it uses characters in the "unicode private use area" -- which are effectively undefined -- but putting those codepoints in your HTML document while having the appropriate font loaded will show the appropriate icon glyphs.
🙅🎁４👨
Browsers don't add characters, fonts do.
No, fonts ship with them. Browsers don't really care, they see codepoints and ask underlying font-rendering API for the corresponding glyphs, then display that.
And these characters may not have anything to do with browsers, not are they restricted to browsers e.g. "emoji" originate in pre-smartphones cellphone-based text and email messages in japan for instance.
Including this one with comments on the Wingdings addition. http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4239.pdf
You can have fun with this. Say you're disillusioned with your current job and planning to leave within the year. Insert these into whatever important document you're working on at the time, e.g. as bullet points or decoration around titles. Sometime after you leave, they'll reveal their true nature. A sort of "FU" time-bomb.
Note the announcement also includes:
* Changes to the unicode collation algorithm for locale-dependent sorting (I haven't figured out what htey are yet)
* New character properties and values, used for case-changing and line-breaking behavior (i think line-breaking might be locale-dependent too).
* some other stuff
The unicode algorithms for _doing things_ with text in appropriate ways are actually way more mind-blowing to me than just the directory of glyphs. When you start thinking about it and get into the weeds and realize how other languages work very differently than English with regard to some of this stuff -- proper "uppercase" or "sort" or "are these two strings semantically the same" across the global universe of glpyhs -- is _really_ challenging, and unicode does a pretty amazing job of it.
It's sadly way more confusing to figure out if/when the unicode library of your choice has been updated to use unicode 7.0 (or even 6.0) text algorithms and full character database with properties, rather than to figure out if a given font includes the new glpyh or whatever.