7 ms·
Unicode Standard, Version 12.0
- josteink 8y agoI wonder what fringe diversity group has gotten their new custom emojis accepted this time. Does Unicode care about actual languages any more?
- chungy 8y agoIt's about half-way into the post that it talks about emoji and not actual languages, so the answer is pretty obviously yes.
- detaro 8y agoGiven this release adds several new scripts, which actual languages do you think they don't care enough about? (+ of course there being several groups of people involved, so it's not an either/or thing)
- thomasfoster96 8y agoWell, as the linked post says in the first paragraph, almost 90% of the 554 new characters aren’t emoji, and include four new scripts (used by several different languages) and additions for several other scripts. Emoji are only mentioned once in the first half of the article, and unless you consider accessibility-related emoji to be only for a “fringe diversity group”, I’m not sure how the newly added emoji [0] could be particularly controversial? [0] http://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-released.html http://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-released.html
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoAnd only 14 of the new emoji are related to accessibility, of which 6 are gender-specific. The rest is stuff like garlic and yo-yo. I mean think of yo-yoers what you will but I don't think they're a fringe diversity group :p.
- MrEldritch 8y agoI actually went into this post fully expecting to make the same snarky comment, but upon actually reading the article, they added 554 characters and 4 new scripts, along with stuff like Egyptian hieroglyph formatting support, vs. 61 emojis. Which made the idea of snarking about how they only cared about emojis look rather silly. Anyway, since you asked, the fringe diversity group getting the new custom emojis is disabled people (mainly hearing-impaired, vision-impaired, and wheelchair users). So, y'know, on the order of 10% of the population. Very fringe.
- titanix2 8y agoThe whole emoticon thing have became ridiculous. It's time for Unicode to split and let the kids playing with their images and to focus on more important, textual things. For example the cuneiform block is not detailed enough to be used by scholars.
- majewsky 8y agoDo you think that the committee approving new emojis is qualified to seamlessly transition into discussing the minutiae of cuneiform formatting? It may be a guess on my part, but I'm pretty confident that there are two different (and probably non-overlapping) sets of people working on these two areas.
- MrEldritch 8y agoPerhaps Unicode could solve the emoji problem once and for all by providing a mechanism for encoding arbitrary .svgs as multi-kilobyte strings of modifier characters.
- Dylan16807 8y agoHmm, they did include that block for encoding arbitrary bitmap images. (U+2800)
- titanix2 8y agoU+2800 etc. is for Braille, which is an alphabet. Nothing to do with bitmaps.
- ygra 8y agoI think it was a joke referring to some people using Braille to display black and white images as text, e.g. https://loveeevee.github.io/Dots-Converter/retro.html https://loveeevee.github.io/Dots-Converter/retro.html
- sctb 8y agoIf you aren't going to post substantively, don't post at all. We're asked you several times before and eventually we ban accounts that won't follow the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- edent 8y agoIt is a shame that the majority of these won't been seen by common devices. Google has stopped work on their Noto fonts initiative, and modern versions of Android are stuck with pre Unicode 10. Apple has been pretty good at adding Emoji on iOS, but macOS seems to be left behind. As for Linux... Installing the Unifont gives coverage, but most distros don't seem to have a way to update base level fonts. I'd love to be proved wrong about any of this. But is seems that the majority of systems don't care because their native scripts are already supported.
- alwillis 8y agoApple has been pretty good at adding Emoji on iOS, but macOS seems to be left behind. The latest macOS version gets emoji updates regularly; it stays in sync with the latest iOS.
- thomasfedb 8y agoEmoji handling on Linux is so upsetting. It should not be this tricky.
- magicalhippo 8y agoI submit that it should: http://baldi.me/blog/emoji-in-sql http://baldi.me/blog/emoji-in-sql
- m6w6 8y agoHilarious.
- Freak_NL 8y agoThat's fine though. On Linux distributions care is usually taken to ensure fonts that cover all languages in common use today, but there is no need to cover every glyph in the standard right from the start. Some Unicode blocks eventually get a default font, some are so specialistic that you have to install a special font, but that's perfectly doable. Newer versions of distributions tend to come with updated versions of the fonts installed, so eventually support will increase.
- billpg 8y agoEmojis are a plot to make English-speaking developers care about fixing their code to work with Unicode.
- Dylan16807 8y agoIf only they hadn't tried to cut it down to 16 bits near the start, we could have avoided a lot of the partial support that emojis expose.
- nikbackm 8y agoMaybe all Asian scripts was not planned to be included back then? Seems strange they would miscount so grossly otherwise.
- Dylan16807 8y agoIt's all down to CJK. Originally they allocated 21k codepoints to CJK, and if that was accurate then 16 bits would pretty much fit things. But we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned out of possibly more than 100k total. I can't easily find anything about how this went wrong and they got such a small number.
- vorg 8y ago> we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned If you also count the Unihan variations registered in Unicode's ideographic variation database by various Japanese outfits, encoded using the VS16 to VS255 characters after the codepoint they modify, there's another 8k or 9k unique characters assigned.
- billpg 8y agoIdeally, we'd have started from UTF-8 and never even bothered with 16 bit chars in the first place.
- Freak_NL 8y agoNot just Unicode, but Unicode characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). At the very least it is a pleasant unintended consequence. A decade ago support for characters outside of the BMP was hairy (certainly possibly though in PDF's with LaTeX via XeLaTeX), and something you would use if you dabbled in the obscure glyphs contained in it; now it is standard.
- daoxid 8y agoAre the more fancy scripts supported by Unicode used by real people in production? By scholars? With special fonts? Or is it more like Unicode just wanting to support everything, even though the target audience is actually using something else? Asking because I'm impressed by the aim of the whole Unicode project but having no real experience with it beyond the basics.
- wongarsu 8y agoMostly scholars. But even if nobody at all would be using it currently, the explicit goal of Unicode is to support all scripts. Unicode is meant to make all other text encodings obsolete so the world never has to think about text encodings again (which mostly worked so far). That goal can only be reached/maintained if every script anyone might plausibly want to use is contained in Unicode.
- Freak_NL 8y agoMore specifically, scripts and glyphs that have documented and valid use cases. If you made up a script today, you would have to start using it first (and gain acceptance of it in some community) before it would be eligible for inclusion in the Unicode standard. A good example is the power symbol (⏻, Unicode 9.0). The proposal for it neatly documented that it was in wide use already — in manuals in particular. Emoji are a slightly different beast though. Those seem to get included based on projected use cases.
- epse 8y agoThey used to be included because the Japanese had them in their encoding systems, but the situation now is far more fuzzy. Which is odd for a standard.
- coldtea 8y ago>but the situation now is far more fuzz It's basically: "text/social comment/chat apps are big, let's add more BS icons for our Facebook/Apple/Google/MS/etc chat apps"
- lelf 8y agoEvery top comment is about Emoji… Law of triviality in action ;) Also in Version 12.0, the following Unicode Standard Annexes have notable modifications ⟨…⟩ UAX #14, Unicode Linebreaking Algorithm UAX #29, Unicode Text Segmentation UAX #31, Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax UAX #38, Unicode Han Database (Unihan) UAX #45, U-Source Ideographs
- 781 8y agoIt's not triviality. How many people do you really think care about Elymaic script? Or about Nandinagari?
- vardump 8y agoWhy would you bring up something relatively obscure and ignore all the other major non-emoji changes? In addition to what grandparent listed: > UTS #10, Unicode Collation Algorithm—sorting Unicode text > UTS #39, Unicode Security Mechanisms—reducing Unicode spoofing > UTS #46, Unicode IDNA Compatibility Processing—compatible processing of non-ASCII URLs I think plenty of people care about these changes.
- jameshart 8y agoPresumably some people. Assigning code points is the Unicode consortium’s job. That’s what unicode does. Nobody should be upset that they keep doing it. But you ignore the substance of the parent’s post which is about the new elements of the Unicode standard which are not confined to assigning code points. There is substance there to be analyzed - there is material there about how Unicode should be used in defining identifier syntaxes which is of high relevance to an HN audience (eg in defining your new serverless framework, what characters should you allow in function names? Unicode now has a better answer for you than ‘[a-zA-Z_0-9-]’). There are updates to Unicode security and idna support. But no, sure, let’s complain about emoji and obscure languages.
- coldtea 8y ago>Assigning code points is the Unicode consortium’s job. That’s what unicode does. Nobody should be upset that they keep doing it. Why not? Something being "somebody's job", and others being upset that that somebody keeps doing it, can be very logical. E.g. 1) if the job wastes resources, is deemed silly, is done badly, etc. 2) if the job is detrimental to those others
- qwerty456127 8y agoI would be more amazed to see Tengwar and more conlang scripts added finally.
- rurban 8y agoFWIW, I've updated now the safeclib to 12.0.0 final from the previous 12.0.0-d1, and there were no changes in the case folding tables. And the changes from 11.0 are minimal, just 6 new entries. So it's just a minimal libc specific update, thanksfully. For utf8-safe languages there would be 4 new scripts to add, but this affects only rust, java and cperl. All others are unicode unsafe.