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Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- danielrpa 6y ago...and U+1F4A9 is!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jakeogh 6y agoWhat's the code point for uppercase superscript Z? j/k there isnt one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_superscripts#Latin_and_Greek_tables https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_supersc... No doubt those emoji's are more important and historically common than superscript uppercase C F Q S X Y and Z. https://github.com/jakeogh/unicodehaz https://github.com/jakeogh/unicodehaz
- saagarjha 6y agoIโm actually fairly annoyed that a lot of obvious superscripts, subscripts, and strikethroughs are missing.
- clarry 6y agoI'm actually more annoyed that they are there in the first place. Unicode can't seem to decide whether it's about just encoding text or also doing presentation/formatting (and now piles of poo and colorful emoji, what next, animations?), so now it's a bit of both, what a mess. It's making life hard and breaking things for applications that assume text is just text, and the presentational features are not enough to avoid having to implement your own presentational features in a program that needs to do presentation.. now you have applications where you can't find a string because it was written in Unicode bold letters instead of the letters' normal ASCII counterparts. And then you have applications that are confused about those bold letters because they are not actually surrounded by bold markup. The worst part is that you can't criticize unicode without attracting a crowd of bullies who handwave about human languages being complicated (no, that does not justify poor design) or say it has to be this way because ugh shift-jis (or whatever nasty old encoding you can come up with) is not nice. Well designed technology makes complex things simple. People defending poorly designed technology blame the problem for being complex. ๐ฝ๐ฆ๐๐ ๐ฆ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐! (Why don't you try search for "fuck" in Firefox?)
- GekkePrutser 6y agoYou're so right... Unicode is making things too complex, and intruding on various formatting issues. Case in point: The skin tone modifiers. Or this stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner There doesn't exist any parser that does it 100% correct. And parsing it is becoming so complex that it's causing bugs and vulnerabilities (it's not a coincidence that so many remote exploits use some kind of unicode to trigger it).
- josh_fyi 6y agoThe reason for rejection, for better or worse, is that this is a functional element, like a button, rather than part of running text.
- Sephr 6y agoThat didn't stop the Unicode Consortium from including a left-pointing magnifying glass in the standard. I use this on my blog for the search button.
- Symbiote 6y agoI don't think that's inconsistent. I've seen a right-pointing magnifying glass printed in a book, and a left-pointing one would be equivalent for Arabic or Hebrew. I'd expect to see it in a school science book, for example.
- baddox 6y agoSearch Google Books for โexternal link iconโ and you will find several web design books that describe and depict the icon.
- gray_-_wolf 6y agoAnd as others have already mentioned, I've seen the external link printed in several manuals for various products I've bought.
- jakeogh 6y agoAnd that's the real result of this, people will just settle on a collective commandeering of the closest symbol, making the decision irrelevant and retrospectively worse than pointless. Annoy everyone enough, and we can redefine the nunicode codepoints as rationals and hand the denominator to another group.
- bluescrn 6y agoLike the play/pause symbols then, which are already in there? And since when was a smiling poop an โelement of plain textโ
- chris_wot 6y agoGod, they spend so much time on emoji which is much the same. They are becoming a bit of a joke!
- golergka 6y agoYou don't expect to be able to click emoji, and they don't lose their meaning when printed out on paper.
- felipelemos 6y agoBut this particular symbol just lost his meaning when printed. You don't expect to click on a paper, right?
- tcmb 6y agoCouldn't the URL be the print representation of the link symbol? Text can be represented differently in different media.
- modin 6y agoYou can do this in CSS, but it's semantically different than an external link symbol. @media print { a::after{ content: " (" attr(href) ") "; } }
- etrabroline 6y agoEven assuming that symbols you click on can't be in unicode, you don't click on the external link symbol, you click on the text of the link, and that text will be followed by the symbol. Even if you include the symbol in the link text, it's still part of the text both logically and in practice.
- dandellion 6y agoIf you print a web page the links are still there. The icon tells you "this here was a link" and you can go to the computer and look it up. If the link wasn't underlined and had a different colour but you printed in b&w it might be the only way to know that was a link, so I would argue that the icon is more useful in paper than on a live web, actually.
- jstanley 6y ago> It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text, given the inevitable connection to its function in linking to other documents, and thus its coexistence with markup for links. Furthermore, the existing widespread practice of representing this sign on web pages using images (often specified via CSS styles) would be unlikely to benefit from attempting to encode a character for this image. I don't really have a horse in this race, but... isn't the existing widespread practice of representing the sign using images attributable to the fact there is not a character available? What else do they want people to do? The point of adding the character is so that in the future people can use text instead of an image.
- psychoslave 6y agoI think that the point is, unlike emojis which have been integrated in end products by some vendors, forcing Unicode comity to integrate them due to the Unicode consortium goal of backward compatibility, this icon is enforced in any vendor charset out there.
- totetsu 6y agoThis kind of reminded me of this I was reading this morning http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/2020/04/allonomy-autonomy-and-after.html http://seancubitt.blogspot.com/2020/04/allonomy-autonomy-and... "a poem cannot 'contain in itself the reasons why it is so and not otherwise' (Coleridge) since it must be written on top of the infrastructure of a language and orthography that the poet rarely originates"
- ZiiS 6y agoIt is simply factuly incorrect to say that a commonly used sysmbol would not benifit from being included in fonts. How can a committee working in this field posibly fail to understand that?
- cheschire 6y agoSimilar to case law in America, the committee might be avoiding potential abuse in future requests that point back to the rules being seemingly modified for one specific symbol.
- etrabroline 6y agoIf the rules are allowing U+1F4A9 and disallowing an actual symbol commonly used in text, they should change the rules.
- avianlyric 6y agoWell U+1F4A9 exists because Japanese mobile operators modified their char sets to include emoji, and emoji has been part of Japanese culture for a long time. Unicode aims to encode every character used for human communication in every culture, and Japan uses U+1F4A9.
- etrabroline 6y agoIt is not incorrect, and they do understand but they don't care. They have esoteric philosophical justifications that exclude some commonly used symbols while inventing never before seen ones. This is the problem with putting a tiny number of otherwise powerless people in charge things. They clap become clap petty clap tyrants.
- andai 6y agoWhat is the significance of clap?
- 6y ago
- rustybolt 6y agoI think that most people find this hard to digest. The committee approves a ton of emojis with a dozen variations each, a gazillion characters that make it possible to make some weird word soup that breaks sane layout, but including one of the most commonly used symbols is somehow out of the question.
- DagAgren 6y agoBecause all of those symbols are used as part of text, while the external link symbol isn't. It is not part of the text itself. If you copied that text, you would not really expect the link symbol to be copied along with it.
- nabla9 6y ago>If you copied that text, you would not really expect the link symbol to be copied along with it. Because it's not in Unicode it can't be copied. If it was in unicode symbol I would expect it.
- DagAgren 6y agoBut it's not part of the text, it is a decoration. Even if it was in Unicode, I would not expect it to be part of the copied text.
- pas 6y agoIsn't this something like a stylistic editorial decision? Basically it could be either way depending on what the author/publisher/editor wants. On a lot of pages links are hidden as plain text and only show up if someone hovers over them. (Great? Confusing? Bad UX? Sure, but still a choice.) At the same time someone else might just use underlining, but no different color. And someone might just want to use a symbol.
- cabalamat 6y ago> The UTC rejected the proposals to add โexternal link signโ, most recently in L2/12-169. It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text Nor is Pile of Poo, and that's in Unicode. If external Link was added to Unicode, I expect it would be more used than 1000s of characters that are in it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- stOneskull 6y agoReddit would probably do that in one day.
- DagAgren 6y agoWhy is it not? People use it in plain text millions of times a day.
- gnulinux 6y ago> Nor is Pile of Poo I really really don't understand this point. We have evidence that people use pile of poo in plaintext today in instant messaging all the time. Isn't this enough evidence that pile of poo belongs to plaintext? I'm not trying to be facetious; it's really puzzling to me. Since every single comment in this thread is about pile of poo, whereas it seems to me the worst possible example since it's such a widely used emoji.
- recursive 6y agoIt's only possible to use it in a text message because it's a unicode character. If external link was a character, would people use it? I don't know. Do you?
- gnulinux 6y agoMaybe, maybe not, we don't know. What I know is that even my mom and grandma use pile of poo on facebook. Will they use "external link" symbol? I would guess not, but maybe.
- qwerty456127 6y ago> Furthermore, the existing widespread practice of representing this sign on web pages using images (often specified via CSS styles) would be unlikely to benefit from attempting to encode a character for this image. Obviously enough text-mode browsers would be likely to benefit.
- etrabroline 6y agoThis made my head spin. It's like saying people already using the JIS text encoding would be unlikely to benefit from adding Japanese to Unicode. Absolutely mind blowing.
- DagAgren 6y agoNo, it is saying that Unicode is used to encode what people think of as plain text, and that UI symbols that are not part of the text content are outside the scope of it.
- hunter2_ 6y agoI agree that text mode browsers would benefit, as they can hide the external nature of a URL behind non-URL link text, and not allow an image next to it. But it seems that to be a codepoint, it needs to be useful in plain text scenarios. Text mode browsers which render links as discussed are not plain text.
- Symbiote 6y agoThe closest I can think of is U+2b00 (north east white arrow) followed by U+20de (combining enclosing square). I suspect HN will eat the character: โฌโ although they sometimes pass through if there's enough other text in the comment.
- saagarjha 6y agoHacker News lets some emoji and Unicode through, but Iโm not sure how itโs chosen. Hereโs some I copied from Wikipediaโs page on emoji: โน โ๐๐
- OJFord 6y agoWeird, I've never seen any before this thread, I thought they were all stripped. Bug or feature, I wonder?
- saagarjha 6y agoIโll ask tomorrow if I can remember and get back to you.
- uryga 6y agocould be because emoji are in the 'Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs' Unicode block, but the hourglass symbol is in 'Miscellaneous Technical', so it doesn't count as an emoji according to HN's filter
- Symbiote 6y agoAlternatively, for a single-character symbol, there's either โคค (2924 north east arrow with hook) or โฎณ (2bb3 ribbon arrow up right). The combining square isn't exactly centered, depending on where I paste it. There's a useful selection of arrows here: http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_arrows.html http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_arrows.html
- lstamour 6y agoThe closest alternative Iโve seen is definitely north east arrow with hook. Personally, I like its simpler appearance. Ideally you would still want to label it on hover with some alt or title attribute text.
- irrational 6y ago> It is unclear that the entity in question is actually an element of plain text... As the author pointed out, emojis seem to clearly violate this excuse. What possible justification do they give for emojis? There is no way [I originally inserted the poop emoji here, but it was stripped out. That kind of reinforces my point.] is an element of plain text.
- PeterisP 6y agoThe pile of poop would not ever get accepted as a character in unicode on its own. It's there because of including an existing character encoding set (IIRC from Japanese featurephone messaging standards), which had a pile of poop character and other emoji, so for purposes of compatibility all the characters of that set must get Unicode mappings. So there's a situation of dual standards - all the weird characters that were included in any pre-Unicode text encodings for whatever arbitrary reasons are in Unicode and are always going to be there; but all the new weird characters need appropriate justification for inclusion and are likely to be denied.
- ghusbands 6y agoEmojis are used in the same context as other text to communicate in the same fashion; they were being independently recreated in many technologies and there was direct value in standardising it across systems.
- DagAgren 6y agoWhy wouldn't it be part of plain text? People type it as part of their text messages constantly. They certainly use it as a part of plain text. Nobody would type an external link symbol. It would be added by the UI presentation layer. It is not part of plain text, because it is not typed as part of textual content. But the poop emoji is.
- TeMPOraL 6y agoI find myself agreeing with the rejection. As much as I dislike the ridiculous amount of emojis in Unicode, and their increasingly widespread use, they do fit plain text communication, whereas an "external link" symbol does not. My heuristic is something I'll call SMS sniff test: would it make sense to type that symbol into a text message? If it wouldn't, then it doesn't belong in Unicode. "External link" symbol tells you, "that last bit of differently-formatted text is an active element in this application, leading to an outside resource". It's not something that makes sense in plain text, because any external link in a plain text message is both visible and obviously a link. Elsewhere in the thread someone mentioned the play/pause/stop symbols from cassette recorders/VCRs. But those have been used culturally as symbols denoting starting, pausing and stopping for decades now, so they're an idea communication tool that makes sense in plain text, and thus pass the SMS sniff test. (Note that I'm not sure if all symbols in Unicode actually pass the SMS sniff test. I suppose the best option for those wanting "external link" symbol to be included would be to resubmit it as the DOUBLE ARROW POINTING TOP RIGHT OUT OF SQUARE symbol, or something like that.)
- tomc1985 6y agoI agree with you but including it would make it easier to express in text-only environments
- hunter2_ 6y agoPlain text environments never encounter the problem that this symbol solves, which is to reveal that an anchor tag (which is not plain text, and typically has visible text that isn't the URL) leads to some other authority. But for a text mode interface that does have full blown anchor tags -- not very mainstream -- you have a point.
- stOneskull 6y agoReddit is mainstream. Other forums with linking might find the symbol handy.. Not sure why unicode has got to be about SMS..
- runxel 6y agoThis article sums up my encounter of the Unicode committee pretty well. They have stopped long ago making sane decisions.
- mr_isomies 6y agoTheir ruling aligns with my own experience of committees and regulator: strict fundamentalist interpretations of made up rules that borders on the contrariant or lazy. The meta goal is usability. This shouldn't be a philosophical debate about what constitute a symbol...
- mci 6y agoOne of most peculiar tourist attractions in the Wieliczka salt mine near Krakow are signs with a shaft symbol that is not in Unicode. It looks like a # with a ยท in the middle and appears in texts instead of the word "shaft".
- ghusbands 6y ago> Its main rationale appears to be that the external link icon is not an element of plain text. I would agree that is the case. However I would like to point out that emoji and other similar useful symbols are not plain text either yet they have been accepted and continue to be accepted. The author seems to be using a very limited definition of "plain text". Emoji are clearly used in the same way as latin-character text in communication, so they are effectively plain text. I think a more effective argument may be that the external-link symbol should be allowed for the same reasons that the power on/off/toggle and eject symbols were allowed.
- webkike 6y agoEmojis are definitely plain text, as they have meaning when I write them on a piece of paper
- recursive 6y agoThe external link symbol also has meaning when written on papaer, which is "external link".
- yoz-y 6y agoI'd like the condition on the plain text to be relaxed. I would love to be able to use Unicode for creating basic interfaces. I would love to have basic interface elements such as a magnifying glass, "save" icons and external link to be part of the standard. Maybe they don't strictly find their use but for one people would find the use if they were there, and two, there are already (granted, grandfathered) elements that were used exactly for this purpose back in the era of plain text window interfaces.
- squiggleblaz 6y agoThere's the PUA. And I mean, it's not like it doesn't happen. See font awesome for instance.
- yoz-y 6y agoI use the awesome versions of fonts in terminal for power line and stuff. But that's kind of the thing, it can't be ubiquitous and easily reused. If every system had it's interface font it would make a lot of stuff easier. An example would be glyphs on buttons that are almost always the same.
- akvadrako 6y agoAfter getting an emoji accepted I submitted a proposal for the external link symbol in 2018, trying to address the committee's concerns from the several earlier proposals. https://doubly.so/pub/External-Link-2018.pdf https://doubly.so/pub/External-Link-2018.pdf It was summarily rejected with the nonsense statement (in full): > Thank you for your submission. This was discussed during last week's UTC meeting. I was directed to let you know UTC feels that, as submitted, the proposal does not sufficiently demonstrate a plain text need for such a symbol. The context for usage is mark-up with links by default.
- ajnin 6y agoAt this point I think a submission of 8 generic "arrow exiting square from top, top-right, etc." might have a better chance of being accepted as it holds a general meaning of exiting something and is not specific to hypertext as seems to be their objection.
- chrisseaton 6y agoWhy do you need to know that a link is an external link?
- pfranz 6y agoI see it often in intranets, wikis, and PDF documentation. It's an additional context clue that you're leaving a closed website. The most egregious examples give you a separate click-through screen when leaving the website. Government web pages seem to do this the most. It would be nice if we could all use a standard icon or some other constant UI element--like a single underline for internal references and double underline for external? I imagine unique colors would be too difficult to standardize.
- chrisseaton 6y agoYeah but why? What do people do with the information that a link is external? Do people think 'I'll follow this link - oh no wait a minute it's external I won't'?
- SquareWheel 6y agoSure. Why not? If you're browsing a hotel you plan to stay at, you may want to spend some time learning about it before booking. Accidentally clicking an external link takes you away from that. Techies will know to just open it in a new tab, but most will have to remember to browse back to the site manually. It can be a disruptive process.
- recursive 6y ago> Do people think 'I'll follow this link - oh no wait a minute it's external I won't'? Some do, sometimes. Or perhaps they'll think 'I won't follow this link - oh no wait a minute, it's external I will'.
- pfranz 6y agoSpecifically in those circumstances it's more important than normal; intranet, government, and PDF documents. Intranet: bespoke documentation to internal processes verses generic documents used for reference. Government: external references can be hijacked (asking for personal information) or may not represent the government but still have relevant info. PDF documents: jumping around a PDF document (from a table of contents) is different than going to an external website. Especially if you don't have Internet access at that moment. I think all of this is significantly more important since browser have been hiding more URLs.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dan-robertson 6y agoI think an issue with the arguments here is that each side is making its arguments based around quite different standards. Unicode have two standards for inclusion of symbols, one for adding new symbols and one for merging in characters from other character sets. The rejection is based on the first standard for adding new characters. The arguments against it seem to be based on taking the second standard as precedent. But I think as far as the Unicode committees are concerned, arguments based on the precedent of whatever random crap was grandfathered in from preexisting character sets do not apply to characters that are not from preexisting character sets. I think any argument that relies on โyou already allow all this other random crapโ must also argue that this symbol exists in some other character set which ought to be merged into Unicode, or that the standard for new characters should be more precedent-based/different, but I donโt see any such arguments other than some implied โcommon sense guess as to how one expects Unicode to workโ
- Aeolun 6y agoSo the smartest way to go about this is to create a whole new character set for external link symbols? That seems like a really roundabout way to get this thing accepted.
- syrrim 6y agoCreate a custom font with your custom character in the private use area. Use the popularity of your font to demonstrate pressing need.
- cryptonector 6y agoThe word you're looking for is "script". And, no. One has to make a better argument for the external link symbol getting a codepoint assignment. TFA, for example, makes an argument based on emojis -- certainly that's strong enough to blunt the UTC's rejection rationale, but perhaps not enough to win approval outright. Addressing all the arguments used in the rejection is important, of course. The fact that currently images are used is hardly dispositive: that's business as usual for missing Unicode assignments!! But there are probably stronger arguments for rejection than adoption than the UTC made that it could make the next time this comes up. The best argument for rejection that I can think of has to do with layering. An external link character isn't very useful without the actual external link, but the link belongs a layer up: not in the text, but in the markup. Well, if the link belongs a layer up, why not also the symbol? Alternatively, more markup can move into Unicode. There has been and will continue to be some pressure to move more semantics from markup to text, but it's probably best to resist that pressure. On the other hand, a solid argument for adoption may involve text rendering of HTML. Think of lynx/elinks and other such browsers, which can't use images. An external link character could prove useful in distinguishing the rendering of linked text from, say, underlined non-linked text. I'm surprised these arguments didn't come up. Or maybe they did -- I've not gone down the rabbit hole on this one, and probably I won't.
- savolai 6y agoI want a tool that scans English ๏ฃ text for names of unicode symbols. Then I want the English language to move to that symbolic writing. You know, because it is fun to see cultures evolve.
- paulsutter 6y agoHow many new characters are proposed each year? Whatโs the rejection rate? Maybe itโs a healthy process to reject when uncertain and then reconsider after popular appeals, especially if they are inundated with (mostly) questionable applications. Itโs premature to judge the process without more context
- ape4 6y agoGlad they say "no" sometimes
- GekkePrutser 6y agoDidn't stop them from making Unicode an overcomplicated clusterfuck of combination codes though... Referring to things like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-width_joiner . It's become almost impossible to build an accurate parser now.
- EGreg 6y agoFor this stuff we have fontawesome and ttf generators from svgโs. Just grab svg icons on thenounproject and make your way own font! I happen to disagree with the unicode decision because there should be a section for basic commands so they can be rendered in diff fonts. But whatever โ as I say donโt wait for standards if they donโt exist, make your own!
- modzu 6y agoclick hอeอrอe to learn more about the decision
- Finnucane 6y agoI think from the consortium's point of view it boils down to whether it makes sense to consider the link symbol separately from the text that makes up the link. They apparently decided it did not, but you could disagree. Of course, it does not really matter if you disagree, because they won't change their mind (unless you repropose it in a way that makes a different argument from the original proposal, which their rejection is basically saying could be considered).
- 11235813213455 6y agoU+1F517 https://emojipedia.org/link/ https://emojipedia.org/link/ might do this job Anyway I think we can avoid target="_blank" most of the time, you can have a https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowEventHandlers/onbeforeunload https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WindowEvent... event listener if something needs to be saved before the page location changes
- Izkata 6y agoI generally see that one used as "permalink/create share link to the current page".
- archgoon 6y agoThis would make copying links harder as you would need to avoid copying the link symbol, unless the link symbol was part of the URL.
- vagab0nd 6y agoTalk about timing, I was just looking for this in unicode for my website yesterday. Didn't find anything that looked good so ended up going with Font Awesome: https://fontawesome.com/icons/external-link-alt?style=solid https://fontawesome.com/icons/external-link-alt?style=solid I think it's a missed opportunity for unicode.
- chadlavi 6y agotry `\u2197`. You can see it used on external links here: https://chadlavi.github.io/clear/#/link#examples https://chadlavi.github.io/clear/#/link#examples
- Haga 6y agoWhoever manages this time line, that is some smooth large scale social engineering. Congrats =)
- chadlavi 6y agoI usually just use `\u2197` or similar.
- crazypython 6y agoa::after { content: url(my_external_link_symbol.gif); }
- c-smile 6y agoAgree with the rejection. The same link in different contexts can be as either external or local. So that is a business of UA/renderer to mark it properly. CSS is quite adequate for that (https://davidwalsh.name/external-links-css https://davidwalsh.name/external-links-css) and the image (or whatever author/UA decided to use) can go inline in CSS itself.
- joelanman 6y agoWe removed it from GOV.UK in 2016: https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/28/removing-the-external-link-icon-from-gov-uk/ https://designnotes.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/28/removing-the-exte...
- sova 6y ago"unicode was intended only for print media" doesn't bleed with irony already?