5 ms·

3. Yes, sadly. 4. Can you expand on that?

by q-rews 5y ago

WalterBright 5y ago
> expand Sure. I don't know what most of the buttons do on my car's dashboard, because of the "iconitis" disease that has infected user interface design. Unicode has blessed and encouraged this crap. They don't just standardize, they invent icons intending them to replace the phonetic words. (Apple is kinda schizophrenic on this. Sometimes you'll see "DELETE" as a button, sometimes a trash can.) I don't know what the wash icons on my clothes mean without going to google and looking them up. You can't look up an icon in a dictionary, making it a fundamentally wretched replacement for a phonetic alphabet. Worse, people persistently try to invent icons for verbs and adjectives, which never ever work. Even for nouns, is that scribble a bird, a duck, or a chicken? My car has a button with something that looks like a snowflake on it. Does it turn the heater on? The defroster? The air conditioner? Turn on traction control? Who the hell knows?
- q-rews 5y ago
  > Who the hell knows? The manual. I see what you’re saying, Gmail is painful to use for this exact reason. I’d argue it’s fine on cars though for a few reasons: - there probably aren’t that many icons to be aware of in a car - cars are generally owned for a long time, so learning 2 new icons every 5-10 years is not much to ask - cost-cutting on I18n: the snowflake could be AC in English but “airflugencoldensteiner” in some other language. It doesn’t scale and it can’t be sold across borders without looking out of place.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    > The manual. Right, while hurtling down the freeway I can always dig the 500 page manual out and dig through it. Note that I can't use the index to find those icons, because icons have no alphabetic order. Like I said, going backwards 2000 years. > airflugencoldensteiner So just use AC. You can even look it up in the index. > It doesn’t scale and Yah, show it to an illiterate desert dweller, and ask them what they make of it. > it can’t be sold across borders without looking out of place. Of course it can be. Whatcha gonna do, translate that entire 500 page manual into hieroglyphs? Isn't it hilarious that now an entire generation of adults has never used a phone that looks like the typical phone icon? The phone icon on my iphone looks like a phone from the 1960's. However, "PHONE" has remained constant.
    - aqsalose 5y ago
      >Right, while hurtling down the freeway I can always dig the 500 page manual out and dig through it. Note that I can't use the index to find those icons, because icons have no alphabetic order. Like I said, going backwards 2000 years. You can't also look at index to decipher what it means to see "red light bulb that is 'on' over two light bulbs that are 'off'" or "human figure walking over piano keyboard inside a white triangle which is inside a blue square" when you are driving, you are supposed to get familiar with those symbols before get in the car. Typical car has barely a dozen or two pictograms, and any car is a machine than can easily kill and maim. It would be advisable to look at the manual before one starts driving. Of course, it would advisable if those symbols were also standardized like traffic signs. I actually agree with you about Unicode mission creep, but it is better not get overboard with pictograms that have nothing to with Unicode.
      - WalterBright 5y ago
        My old car has controls labeled "defrost", "heat", "cold". I never even had a manual for it. US roads still have plenty of signs in English, like "Speed Limit", "Stop", "Yield", "Road Construction", "Detour", "No Turn On Red", etc. Nobody has any trouble understanding them.
        JadeNB 5y ago
        > US roads still have plenty of signs in English, like "Speed Limit", "Stop", "Yield", "Road Construction", "Detour", "No Turn On Red", etc. Nobody has any trouble understanding them. I strongly suspect that "Nobody has any trouble understanding them" is not true. While I agree with you that iconitis can go overboard, I think pretending that words are universally clearer—in the sense of every place, but also for everyone, not just you—is an exaggeration.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        > I strongly suspect that "Nobody has any trouble understanding them" is not true. This sort of comment is inevitable. I could say "everyone likes ice cream" and I'd get a comment saying they know someone who doesn't like ice cream. I could say "people have two legs" and there's be comment about someone who was born with one leg.
- Thiez 5y ago
  > I don't know what the wash icons on my clothes mean without going to google and looking them up. But odds are these icons have been there (unchanged) since before the invention of unicode, so that's hardly an example of the "iconitis" you mention, right?
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    I don't recall them before Unicode. I do recall "dry clean only" on the tags, etc. Iconitis escaped from the laboratory in 1983, when Apple decided that English was obsolete and we should revert to the language of the Pharaohs. (Well, except that even the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt discovered that phonetics was better, and turned their hieroglyphs into a phonetic alphabet. The Mayans did, too.) An Apple evangelist came to my workplace in 1983 and gleefully tried to sell the engineers on the idea that a drawing of a Kleenex box was better than the word "print". The trouble is "print" is a verb, and nobody has yet come up with an icon for it in 40 years of trying.
    - aqsalose 5y ago
      The laundry washing pictogram symbols are an Europe (French) thing from the 1960s. edit. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20201001165119/https://www.ginetex.ch/en/kennzeichnung-weltweit/geschichte/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201001165119/https://www.ginet...
    - OskarS 5y ago
      > I don't recall them before Unicode. I do recall "dry clean only" on the tags, etc. These icons are far older than unicode, and in fact is not in unicode at the moment. There's a proposal to add them, but I don't believe it's passed yet. The standardized icons themselves date from the 1970s, though non-standard laundry symbols are much older than that. Design use of icons over text has nothing to do with Unicode, it's a natural part of human expression. Icons are everywhere, from traffic signs to laundry symbols to buttons on computers to ramblings signs. I think your reading of the typographical history here is simply wrong, neither Apple nor Unicode is responsible for the "iconiziation" of communication. We've always used icons for communication, and we always will. If your issue is with Emoji, then you should make that case instead. Personally, i think it's great that if I send an emoji from an iPhone to an Android phone (or from/to essentially any device), you get a consistent symbol, instead of being locked in to whatever your manufacturer was using (the fact that this kind of lock-in was occurring was the original motivation for adding emoji to Unicode). Btw, laundry symbols are a perfect demonstration for another wonderful feature of using icons: they're cross language. You can put one tag on a piece of clothing and sell it anywhere in the world. Not everyone speaks English.

3. Yes, sadly. 4. Can you expand on that?

by q-rews 5y ago

3. Yes, sadly. 4. Can you expand on that?

> expand Sure. I don't know what most of the buttons do on my car's dashboard, because of the "iconitis" disease that has infected user interface design. Unicode has blessed and encouraged this crap. They don't just standardize, they invent icons intending them to replace the phonetic words. (Apple is kinda schizophrenic on this. Sometimes you'll see "DELETE" as a button, sometimes a trash can.) I don't know what the wash icons on my clothes mean without going to google and looking them up. You can't look up an icon in a dictionary, making it a fundamentally wretched replacement for a phonetic alphabet. Worse, people persistently try to invent icons for verbs and adjectives, which never ever work. Even for nouns, is that scribble a bird, a duck, or a chicken? My car has a button with something that looks like a snowflake on it. Does it turn the heater on? The defroster? The air conditioner? Turn on traction control? Who the hell knows?

q-rews 5y ago
> Who the hell knows? The manual. I see what you’re saying, Gmail is painful to use for this exact reason. I’d argue it’s fine on cars though for a few reasons: - there probably aren’t that many icons to be aware of in a car - cars are generally owned for a long time, so learning 2 new icons every 5-10 years is not much to ask - cost-cutting on I18n: the snowflake could be AC in English but “airflugencoldensteiner” in some other language. It doesn’t scale and it can’t be sold across borders without looking out of place.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > The manual. Right, while hurtling down the freeway I can always dig the 500 page manual out and dig through it. Note that I can't use the index to find those icons, because icons have no alphabetic order. Like I said, going backwards 2000 years. > airflugencoldensteiner So just use AC. You can even look it up in the index. > It doesn’t scale and Yah, show it to an illiterate desert dweller, and ask them what they make of it. > it can’t be sold across borders without looking out of place. Of course it can be. Whatcha gonna do, translate that entire 500 page manual into hieroglyphs? Isn't it hilarious that now an entire generation of adults has never used a phone that looks like the typical phone icon? The phone icon on my iphone looks like a phone from the 1960's. However, "PHONE" has remained constant.
  - aqsalose 5y ago
    >Right, while hurtling down the freeway I can always dig the 500 page manual out and dig through it. Note that I can't use the index to find those icons, because icons have no alphabetic order. Like I said, going backwards 2000 years. You can't also look at index to decipher what it means to see "red light bulb that is 'on' over two light bulbs that are 'off'" or "human figure walking over piano keyboard inside a white triangle which is inside a blue square" when you are driving, you are supposed to get familiar with those symbols before get in the car. Typical car has barely a dozen or two pictograms, and any car is a machine than can easily kill and maim. It would be advisable to look at the manual before one starts driving. Of course, it would advisable if those symbols were also standardized like traffic signs. I actually agree with you about Unicode mission creep, but it is better not get overboard with pictograms that have nothing to with Unicode.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      My old car has controls labeled "defrost", "heat", "cold". I never even had a manual for it. US roads still have plenty of signs in English, like "Speed Limit", "Stop", "Yield", "Road Construction", "Detour", "No Turn On Red", etc. Nobody has any trouble understanding them.
      - JadeNB 5y ago
        > US roads still have plenty of signs in English, like "Speed Limit", "Stop", "Yield", "Road Construction", "Detour", "No Turn On Red", etc. Nobody has any trouble understanding them. I strongly suspect that "Nobody has any trouble understanding them" is not true. While I agree with you that iconitis can go overboard, I think pretending that words are universally clearer—in the sense of every place, but also for everyone, not just you—is an exaggeration.
        WalterBright 5y ago
        > I strongly suspect that "Nobody has any trouble understanding them" is not true. This sort of comment is inevitable. I could say "everyone likes ice cream" and I'd get a comment saying they know someone who doesn't like ice cream. I could say "people have two legs" and there's be comment about someone who was born with one leg.
Thiez 5y ago
> I don't know what the wash icons on my clothes mean without going to google and looking them up. But odds are these icons have been there (unchanged) since before the invention of unicode, so that's hardly an example of the "iconitis" you mention, right?
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I don't recall them before Unicode. I do recall "dry clean only" on the tags, etc. Iconitis escaped from the laboratory in 1983, when Apple decided that English was obsolete and we should revert to the language of the Pharaohs. (Well, except that even the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt discovered that phonetics was better, and turned their hieroglyphs into a phonetic alphabet. The Mayans did, too.) An Apple evangelist came to my workplace in 1983 and gleefully tried to sell the engineers on the idea that a drawing of a Kleenex box was better than the word "print". The trouble is "print" is a verb, and nobody has yet come up with an icon for it in 40 years of trying.
  - aqsalose 5y ago
    The laundry washing pictogram symbols are an Europe (French) thing from the 1960s. edit. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20201001165119/https://www.ginetex.ch/en/kennzeichnung-weltweit/geschichte/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201001165119/https://www.ginet...
  - OskarS 5y ago
    > I don't recall them before Unicode. I do recall "dry clean only" on the tags, etc. These icons are far older than unicode, and in fact is not in unicode at the moment. There's a proposal to add them, but I don't believe it's passed yet. The standardized icons themselves date from the 1970s, though non-standard laundry symbols are much older than that. Design use of icons over text has nothing to do with Unicode, it's a natural part of human expression. Icons are everywhere, from traffic signs to laundry symbols to buttons on computers to ramblings signs. I think your reading of the typographical history here is simply wrong, neither Apple nor Unicode is responsible for the "iconiziation" of communication. We've always used icons for communication, and we always will. If your issue is with Emoji, then you should make that case instead. Personally, i think it's great that if I send an emoji from an iPhone to an Android phone (or from/to essentially any device), you get a consistent symbol, instead of being locked in to whatever your manufacturer was using (the fact that this kind of lock-in was occurring was the original motivation for adding emoji to Unicode). Btw, laundry symbols are a perfect demonstration for another wonderful feature of using icons: they're cross language. You can put one tag on a piece of clothing and sell it anywhere in the world. Not everyone speaks English.