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Ask HN: Why are the no useful Unicode chars, like wifi?
Unicode 9 is bringing things like facepalm, avocado, canoe, etc. ( see http://emojipedia.org/unicode-9.0/ ), but we still don't seem to have characters for widely used signs, like wifi, bluetooth, various level signal bars, or, god forsake, RSS.
There is U+1F4F6, usually used as mobile data connection indicator, whereas we have U+1F508, U+1F507, U+1F509, U+1F50A, U+1F568, U+1F569, U+1F56A just for speakers.
I'm unaware of the potential licensing problems on these signs, and it doesn't really make sense not to have them.
Is anyone aware why is the situation like this?
( Note: HN strips astral-plane characters, so use U+ format )
- chriswarbo 10y ago> Is anyone aware why is the situation like this? Maybe because logos don't have any place in an alphabet? > it doesn't really make sense not to have them. I would claim it doesn't really make sense to have facepalm, avocado, etc. As far as I'm aware, the original set of emoji were included due to existing messages on Japanese networks using proprietary encodings. There are precisely zero existing messages containing wifi or bluetooth logos as characters; adding such things to unicode creates a problem to solve, rather than solving anything. At this point it seems like unicode is being treated as a meme database, with code points as URIs and the system font as a retrieval mechanism. This bulldozes through a number of carefully chosen separations of concern (characters/code points vs glyphs, glyphs vs fonts, fonts vs images, images vs URLs, etc.), with the only reasoning I can fathom being to fit the current implementation of the iOS on-screen keyboard.