Chess pieces aren't included just because of legacy computer software, chess pieces and many related symbols in Unicode come from "there are hundreds of years o

Chess pieces aren't included just because of legacy computer software, chess pieces and many related symbols in Unicode come from "there are hundreds of years of books that use these symbols and encoding those books needs these symbols". I think that's also a distinction often missing in technical people's assumptions about Unicode and why it isn't just a cross-platform "FontAwesome" even just of legacy proto-FontAwesomes like Wingdings (which is also included and is its own different story). Unicode Consortium likes proposals to include things such as scanned documents of "here's how this 1850s book used chess symbols in the flow of text to communicate how the game is played". Not as adornments or images or separate figures, but directly as a part of the text. That was one of the things that the Power Symbol Proposal [1] that was heavily discussed on HN in the past (and sort of spun out of HN comments in the first place) wound up learning and realizing how big that was to Unicode Consortium's needs in a proposal. "How was this used in real examples in the flow of text?" Finding and being able to cite and scan real world examples from text books and help documentation is an important part of the process. Even the chess pieces were about communicating to other people, in the flow of text in historic books and magazine articles and discussions. [1] https://unicodepowersymbol.com/ https://unicodepowersymbol.com/