3 ms·
Any reason why these charcters cannot be revoked if nobody uses them?
by mistaken 8y ago
Any reason why these charcters cannot be revoked if nobody uses them?
- TheDong 8y agoHow do you prove a unicode character is unused? Look at every database field in the entire world? Every book someone has ever typed on a computer and printed? See what fonts include them or don't? You can't define what an unused character looks like once it's in the standard... even less if it's already available on almost every modern computer. People have already used these "ghost characters" when describing them, as jokes in their online handles, etc... This article and now this comment include "妛" which is one such character. Furthermore, how would you even remove them? Tell all font authors "unicode point X now shouldn't be included in your font"... why would they ever bother to remove something from a font? And what would be the benefit? Unicode offers enough codepoints that there's plenty of space left over for whatever garbage you wish to include, like new emojis and super-astral-aether-planar characters.
- garmaine 8y agoThis blog post used them.
- int_19h 8y agohttps://www.unicode.org/policies/stability_policy.html https://www.unicode.org/policies/stability_policy.html Encoding Stability Applicable Version: Unicode 2.0+ Once a character is encoded, it will not be moved or removed. This policy ensures that implementers can always depend on each version of the Unicode Standard being a superset of the previous version. The Unicode Standard may deprecate the character (that is, formally discourage its use), but it will not reallocate, remove, or reassign the character.
- mjevans 8y agoPresumably they can also be entered as part of a passphrase. Now that it's published it's even more likely.