5 ms·

Tangentially related: I think this is the first time I see an emoji URL “in the wild“, not as a proof of concept. I don't know how to feel about it.

ivan_ah 8y ago
interesting; i didn't know you can do that... urldecode(%F0%9F%A4%94) = would be pretty awkward to see the urlencoded version (e.g. on paper and source code), but I guees it just works as far as UI is concerned. Can you have emoji domain xn--?? What about and emoji tld?
- tim-- 8y ago
  > have emoji domain xn--?? Yes. See http://xn--i-7iq.ws http://xn--i-7iq.ws Edit: HN does not let me enter emoji characters.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    Wow, didn’t know this was possible. What’s next, emoji in stock symbols? Might as well...
    - infogulch 8y ago
      When we start writing legal documents in emoji we will have taken hieroglyphics full circle.
      - alanfalcon 8y ago
        I believe Neal Stephenson essentially anticipates this in Anathem.
    - pasta 8y ago
      It's just unicode. And I think it's good browsers will change it into the the dashed version. Because: www.аррlе.com/
      - tialaramex 8y ago
        Browser vendors have instituted a variety of different rules for this problem, include at least: 1. Decide (policy, enacted by humans) for each TLD if its registry has rules that will prevent abuse, if so whitelist this TLD and show IDNs as text for this TLD, everything else is punycode. 2. Algorithmically detect "confusing" IDNs and show punycode instead for those.
  - floatingatoll 8y ago
    FWIW - If you feel that's a bug worth reporting, drop an email to the site admins at hn@ycombinator.com so they're aware of it.
    - tim-- 8y ago
      To be honest, it's probably for the best, it's just that this is one of those edge cases where it was used for a legitimate purpose.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      I'm fairly sure that the HN comment system has been built back in the early to mid 2000's and hasn't been updated since.
      - detaro 8y ago
        It supports unicode. And indeed, for a while you could post emoji, until they were added to filters disallowing them. You can still find old posts containing them, rendering correctly.
      - lucb1e 8y ago
        You must have missed the recent additions of 'unvote'/'undown', deleting posts (I am not sure anymore, but don't think this was possible a few years ago), limiting edit time, much fewer (in my experience: no more) 'no such thing' errors when the cache expired, collapsible comment trees, etc. These are all small improvements that made it a lot better. That the look hasn't changed for as long as I'm here, I'm quite happy about. If the alternative is something with loads of whitespace and Javascript like Reddit, Skype, etc., then please let us not update "the comment system from the early to mid 2000s".
      - Jaruzel 8y ago
        Which to be honest, is one of the great things about it. It's clean, it's simple, it's fast, and more importantly it's NOT phpBB.
- blauditore 8y ago
  It is, technically. However, most TLDs forbid this.
- codetrotter 8y ago
  Note that the availability of emoji domains is limited. As of August 2017, there were eight top-level domains for which registration of emoji domain names was possible, all of which are ccTLDs: .cf, .fm, .ga, .gq, .ml, .tk, .to, and .ws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain Meanwhile, the total number of TLDs was 1543 TLDs as of April 2018. As of May 2017, there were 255 Country code top-level domains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom... 8 / 1543 ~= 0.5% of all TLDs support emoji. 8 / 255 ~= 3% of all ccTLDs.
- TheDong 8y ago
  > Can you have emoji domains in punicode? Yes. See this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain There are no punicode TLDs, but there are unicode ones, and punicode ones could definitely exist. By example for the unicode ones http://nic.クラウド/en.html http://nic.xn--gckr3f0f/en.html (a japanese unicode gtld)
userbinator 8y ago
It's not really all that unusual to see URLencoded non-ASCII in URLs, especially if you frequent non-English sites.
- kuschku 8y ago
  Yeah, it’s also a common example for why showing punycode for IDNs is a super bad idea. e.g., take fluege.de (a flight comparison site) and flüge.de (a competing flight comparison site). The plain-ascii transscription of ü is ue. Now, flüge.de can’t buy fluege.de, or use that domain, and has no alternative domain. But if you show the punycode version in the URL bar, you just increased the phishing risk significantly, because you’ve trained users to enter their payment data on a xn-randomblabla.de page.
lloydde 8y ago
https://angel.co https://angel.co had (peace-emoji).com for years.
Qwertie 8y ago
Really not a fan. Makes the url impossible to type on desktop.
- ygra 8y ago
  Win+. on Windows 10 at least. But then you still have to know the name of the emoji.
- pervycreeper 8y ago
  Will go one further: the use of emoji at all defeats the purpose of having a language and an alphabet.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    You say that, and yet Egypt became an empire whose history has been saved 4000 years later thanks to a pictogram based language.
    - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
      Egyptians hieroglyphics are phonograms though, not [very loosely defined] ideograms -- I thought that was the point about their translation, that people wrongly assumed they were pictorial ideograms.
  - lagadu 8y ago
    How so? Why can't they be complimentary?
  - Schoolmeister 8y ago
    As the other comment said, why can't they be complementary? Emojis are great for handling subtext and seem to (partly) offer a solution to Poe's law. That being said, I too can't take anyone who uses emojis in his comments seriously.
- nashashmi 8y ago
  That could be a feature.
josteink 8y ago
> Tangentially related: I think this is the first time I see an emoji URL “in the wild“, not as a proof of concept. I don't know how to feel about it. I've seen colour emojis used in emails to grab my attention (as opposed to something plain black on white)... And I know I don't like it.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  Whether the emoji is colour or not, depends on the combo of Browser+OS+Font. On Linux, pretty much every mainstream browser renders emojis in colour. On Windows, it's a bit more complicated: Windows 7 always renders emojis in black and white regardless of the browser, whereas Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 render them in colour. Unless it's Internet Explorer, where they are in black and white again. A LOT of sites also do 'on-the-fly' unicode emoji swap-outs for little png images. Twitter and Facebook are a good examples of this. That way the emoji is always in colour regardless of the platform.
  - Hello71 8y ago
    at least on Linux, it's much less a factor of the program used, as long as it uses freetype (i.e. all programs since 2000 except for crappy Java programs), and much more a factor of simply what fonts are installed by default on the particular distribution. on Arch for example, no emoji fonts are installed by default. in fact, no graphical fonts at all are installed by default, but installing a browser will pull in a ttf-font, by default ttf-dejavu (which also does not contain emoji characters).
- fifnir 8y ago
  I saw an emoji-decorated reddit thread about the new release of a library I really like. I commented how maybe emojis are not appropriate for serious code releases, I was ignored. The next release was also announced with an emoji-decorated title... I guess I'm old already at 32
  - hutzlibu 8y ago
    I feel older at 31. I did not know that emojis existed, till now...

ivan_ah 8y ago

interesting; i didn't know you can do that... urldecode(%F0%9F%A4%94) = would be pretty awkward to see the urlencoded version (e.g. on paper and source code), but I guees it just works as far as UI is concerned. Can you have emoji domain xn--?? What about and emoji tld?

tim-- 8y ago
> have emoji domain xn--?? Yes. See http://xn--i-7iq.ws http://xn--i-7iq.ws Edit: HN does not let me enter emoji characters.
- matte_black 8y ago
  Wow, didn’t know this was possible. What’s next, emoji in stock symbols? Might as well...
  - infogulch 8y ago
    When we start writing legal documents in emoji we will have taken hieroglyphics full circle.
    - alanfalcon 8y ago
      I believe Neal Stephenson essentially anticipates this in Anathem.
  - pasta 8y ago
    It's just unicode. And I think it's good browsers will change it into the the dashed version. Because: www.аррlе.com/
    - tialaramex 8y ago
      Browser vendors have instituted a variety of different rules for this problem, include at least: 1. Decide (policy, enacted by humans) for each TLD if its registry has rules that will prevent abuse, if so whitelist this TLD and show IDNs as text for this TLD, everything else is punycode. 2. Algorithmically detect "confusing" IDNs and show punycode instead for those.
- floatingatoll 8y ago
  FWIW - If you feel that's a bug worth reporting, drop an email to the site admins at hn@ycombinator.com so they're aware of it.
  - tim-- 8y ago
    To be honest, it's probably for the best, it's just that this is one of those edge cases where it was used for a legitimate purpose.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    I'm fairly sure that the HN comment system has been built back in the early to mid 2000's and hasn't been updated since.
    - detaro 8y ago
      It supports unicode. And indeed, for a while you could post emoji, until they were added to filters disallowing them. You can still find old posts containing them, rendering correctly.
    - lucb1e 8y ago
      You must have missed the recent additions of 'unvote'/'undown', deleting posts (I am not sure anymore, but don't think this was possible a few years ago), limiting edit time, much fewer (in my experience: no more) 'no such thing' errors when the cache expired, collapsible comment trees, etc. These are all small improvements that made it a lot better. That the look hasn't changed for as long as I'm here, I'm quite happy about. If the alternative is something with loads of whitespace and Javascript like Reddit, Skype, etc., then please let us not update "the comment system from the early to mid 2000s".
    - Jaruzel 8y ago
      Which to be honest, is one of the great things about it. It's clean, it's simple, it's fast, and more importantly it's NOT phpBB.
blauditore 8y ago
It is, technically. However, most TLDs forbid this.
codetrotter 8y ago
Note that the availability of emoji domains is limited. As of August 2017, there were eight top-level domains for which registration of emoji domain names was possible, all of which are ccTLDs: .cf, .fm, .ga, .gq, .ml, .tk, .to, and .ws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain Meanwhile, the total number of TLDs was 1543 TLDs as of April 2018. As of May 2017, there were 255 Country code top-level domains. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom... 8 / 1543 ~= 0.5% of all TLDs support emoji. 8 / 255 ~= 3% of all ccTLDs.
TheDong 8y ago
> Can you have emoji domains in punicode? Yes. See this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain There are no punicode TLDs, but there are unicode ones, and punicode ones could definitely exist. By example for the unicode ones http://nic.クラウド/en.html http://nic.xn--gckr3f0f/en.html (a japanese unicode gtld)

userbinator 8y ago

It's not really all that unusual to see URLencoded non-ASCII in URLs, especially if you frequent non-English sites.

kuschku 8y ago
Yeah, it’s also a common example for why showing punycode for IDNs is a super bad idea. e.g., take fluege.de (a flight comparison site) and flüge.de (a competing flight comparison site). The plain-ascii transscription of ü is ue. Now, flüge.de can’t buy fluege.de, or use that domain, and has no alternative domain. But if you show the punycode version in the URL bar, you just increased the phishing risk significantly, because you’ve trained users to enter their payment data on a xn-randomblabla.de page.

lloydde 8y ago

https://angel.co https://angel.co had (peace-emoji).com for years.

Qwertie 8y ago

Really not a fan. Makes the url impossible to type on desktop.

ygra 8y ago
Win+. on Windows 10 at least. But then you still have to know the name of the emoji.
pervycreeper 8y ago
Will go one further: the use of emoji at all defeats the purpose of having a language and an alphabet.
- Cthulhu_ 8y ago
  You say that, and yet Egypt became an empire whose history has been saved 4000 years later thanks to a pictogram based language.
  - pbhjpbhj 8y ago
    Egyptians hieroglyphics are phonograms though, not [very loosely defined] ideograms -- I thought that was the point about their translation, that people wrongly assumed they were pictorial ideograms.
- lagadu 8y ago
  How so? Why can't they be complimentary?
- Schoolmeister 8y ago
  As the other comment said, why can't they be complementary? Emojis are great for handling subtext and seem to (partly) offer a solution to Poe's law. That being said, I too can't take anyone who uses emojis in his comments seriously.
nashashmi 8y ago
That could be a feature.

josteink 8y ago

> Tangentially related: I think this is the first time I see an emoji URL “in the wild“, not as a proof of concept. I don't know how to feel about it. I've seen colour emojis used in emails to grab my attention (as opposed to something plain black on white)... And I know I don't like it.

Jaruzel 8y ago
Whether the emoji is colour or not, depends on the combo of Browser+OS+Font. On Linux, pretty much every mainstream browser renders emojis in colour. On Windows, it's a bit more complicated: Windows 7 always renders emojis in black and white regardless of the browser, whereas Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 render them in colour. Unless it's Internet Explorer, where they are in black and white again. A LOT of sites also do 'on-the-fly' unicode emoji swap-outs for little png images. Twitter and Facebook are a good examples of this. That way the emoji is always in colour regardless of the platform.
- Hello71 8y ago
  at least on Linux, it's much less a factor of the program used, as long as it uses freetype (i.e. all programs since 2000 except for crappy Java programs), and much more a factor of simply what fonts are installed by default on the particular distribution. on Arch for example, no emoji fonts are installed by default. in fact, no graphical fonts at all are installed by default, but installing a browser will pull in a ttf-font, by default ttf-dejavu (which also does not contain emoji characters).
fifnir 8y ago
I saw an emoji-decorated reddit thread about the new release of a library I really like. I commented how maybe emojis are not appropriate for serious code releases, I was ignored. The next release was also announced with an emoji-decorated title... I guess I'm old already at 32
- hutzlibu 8y ago
  I feel older at 31. I did not know that emojis existed, till now...