5 ms·
> — How about the left angle bracket "<"? Is that at least a "bracket"? > No. > — Why not? > Because it's a LESS-THAN SIGN. It's petty, and there are bigger
by nfoz 6y ago
> — How about the left angle bracket "<"? Is that at least a "bracket"?
> No.
> — Why not?
> Because it's a LESS-THAN SIGN.
It's petty, and there are bigger problems, but this is one of my main gripes against SGML and its successors.
- tingletech 6y agoyou don't have to use LESS-THAN and GREATER-THAN in an SGML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language#Concrete_and_abstract_syntaxes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_La...
- nfoz 6y agoThat's cool! But it's also somehow even worse, by being so complicated.
- gumby 6y agoTBF Unicode contains quite a few absurdities because of its commitment to round trip consistency. That means glyphs which were obviously representations of the same thing (such as ‘[‘ in one character set and ‘[‘ in another) got different code points, The names often reflect that too.
- nfoz 6y ago? My problem is not with Unicode here. Unicode has angle-brackets. But SGML (which tbf predates Unicode by a lot) doesn't use them.... It uses less-than/greater-than signs and pretends that they're angle-brackets. They're not. Consequently, HTML <tags> are typographically incorrect and look horrible. It's made even worse by "programmer fonts" that make the glyphs for less-than/greater-than look like angle-brackets, which is just wrong; now there's no way to write the comparators. I guess we all just wish that ASCII (and/or keyboards) had one or two more pairs of brackets.
- _-___________-_ 6y agoOne could argue that because of the widespread use of < and > in HTML, those characters have gained an alternate meaning as brackets. Saying they're NOT BRACKETS is a bit like saying "selfie" is not a word. Just as language changes over time, glyphs can gain alternate meanings through usage.
- jodrellblank 6y ago> “I guess we all just wish that ASCII (and/or keyboards) had one or two more pairs of brackets” Imagine pressing < (SHIFT+.) in an editor and getting a pop up autocomplete listbox of a dozen bracket pair combinations.