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I think it's actually pretty neat that they are regular unicode characters, as they then can be applied in any text field, making for fun stuff like using it in

by 0x0 11y ago

I think it's actually pretty neat that they are regular unicode characters, as they then can be applied in any text field, making for fun stuff like using it in Address book contact names or calendar event names or even the terminal. That wouldn't work if markup was required.

josteink 11y ago
I think that's exactly his point. That we have an entire industry where humans in the past could do anything in freeform (pen and paper) we are now limited to representing that as text only. While our human-needs for adding extra "stuff" is still there. If we had an industry-wide "standard" text-representation (with associated UI-widgets and controls) which had the ability to include more than just text, this wouldn't be a problem and we wouldn't need to standardize each new "symbol" we want to represent as "text" in our applications through Unicode. Using Unicode for this certainly feels like inappropriate piggy-backing and a giant hack.
- 0x0 11y ago
  Creating a "standard" text-representation UI widget and markup that works universally sounds like a much larger engineering effort compared to adding some code points to an existing standard, with a much larger room for errors and differences in the implementations. Perfect is the enemy of... something that (already) works :)
  - gherkin0 11y ago
    > Creating a "standard" text-representation UI widget and markup that works universally sounds like a much larger engineering effort compared to adding some code points to an existing standard However, it would arguably be far more useful. > Perfect is the enemy of... something that (already) works :) ...for creating cute text messages and not much else.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    What you said is pretty much textbook definition of short-sightedness :). Perfect is the enemy of good, therefore in things that are actually important (like critical infrastructure) we should not stop when we reach "good enough" :). Or, worse is sometimes better, but usually it's just worse.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  > That we have an entire industry where humans in the past could do anything in freeform (pen and paper) we are now limited to representing that as text only. So, how do I get pen-and-paper notes from Montana to New Mexico in less than a minute? It's still within one country, no wars are going on in the region, should be easy, right?
  - SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
    Fax?
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Scan them and email them.
- Retra 11y ago
  You can't read "anything in freeform." If I scribble a bunch of sworls on a page, that's not going to be communication. And we can still do that today. Go to the store and buy a pen and some paper.

by 0x0 11y ago

josteink 11y ago

I think that's exactly his point. That we have an entire industry where humans in the past could do anything in freeform (pen and paper) we are now limited to representing that as text only. While our human-needs for adding extra "stuff" is still there. If we had an industry-wide "standard" text-representation (with associated UI-widgets and controls) which had the ability to include more than just text, this wouldn't be a problem and we wouldn't need to standardize each new "symbol" we want to represent as "text" in our applications through Unicode. Using Unicode for this certainly feels like inappropriate piggy-backing and a giant hack.

0x0 11y ago
Creating a "standard" text-representation UI widget and markup that works universally sounds like a much larger engineering effort compared to adding some code points to an existing standard, with a much larger room for errors and differences in the implementations. Perfect is the enemy of... something that (already) works :)
- gherkin0 11y ago
  > Creating a "standard" text-representation UI widget and markup that works universally sounds like a much larger engineering effort compared to adding some code points to an existing standard However, it would arguably be far more useful. > Perfect is the enemy of... something that (already) works :) ...for creating cute text messages and not much else.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  What you said is pretty much textbook definition of short-sightedness :). Perfect is the enemy of good, therefore in things that are actually important (like critical infrastructure) we should not stop when we reach "good enough" :). Or, worse is sometimes better, but usually it's just worse.
cbd1984 11y ago
> That we have an entire industry where humans in the past could do anything in freeform (pen and paper) we are now limited to representing that as text only. So, how do I get pen-and-paper notes from Montana to New Mexico in less than a minute? It's still within one country, no wars are going on in the region, should be easy, right?
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
  Fax?
- chris_wot 11y ago
  Scan them and email them.
Retra 11y ago
You can't read "anything in freeform." If I scribble a bunch of sworls on a page, that's not going to be communication. And we can still do that today. Go to the store and buy a pen and some paper.