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Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the co
by colejohnson66 4y ago
Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Even if a character is only used once, it should be possible to save a plaintext version of the containing document without losing any information. Roughly, I should be able to put a transcription of that one translation from the 1400s on Wikisource without using images.
You may disagree with me, and that's fine, but it doesn't change Unicode's mission. Besides, there's room for 1,112,064 codepoints[a], and only 149,146 are in use. It's predicted we'll never use it up, so what harm is there in one codepoint no one will ever need?
[a]: U+10'FFFF max; it used to be U+FFFF'FFFF, but UTF-16 and surrogates ruined that
- modzu 4y agowhy isnt the artist formerly known as prince in unicode?
- djur 4y agoUnicode doesn't have a character for every illuminated initial, nor should it. I'm not clear on why this character should be considered any differently.
- j-bos 4y agoBecause it's already been added to unicode. Now it's not a question of whether or not to add, rather to remove, and unicode almost by definition does not remove.
- thayne 4y agoUnicode does have deprecated code points though. Not that I necessarily think making this character deprecated makes sense.
- skyyler 4y agohttp://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf It was introduced with other "ocular O"s which are seemingly more commonly used than this one. It's not quite an illuminated initial.
- akavel 4y agoWow, this is probably the most actually useful and interesting comment in this whole discussion, thanks! For anyone interested, the most relevant quotes from the document are in particular: "This document requests the addition of a number of Cyrillic characters to be added to the UCS. It also requests clarification in the Unicode Standard of four existing characters. This is a large proposal. While all of the characters are either Cyrillic characters (plus a couple which are used with the Cyrillic script), they are used by different communities. Some are used for non-Slavic minority languages and others are used for early Slavic philology and linguistics, while others are used in more recent ecclesiastical contexts. We considered the possibility of dividing the proposal into several proposals, but since this proposal involves changes to glyphs in the main Cyrillic block, adds a character to the main Cyrillic block, adds 16 characters to the Cyrillic Supplement block, adds 10 characters to the new Cyrillic Extended-A block currently under ballot, creates two entirely new Cyrillic blocks with 55 and 26 characters respectively, as well as adding two characters to the Supplementary Punctuation block, it seemed best for reviewers to keep everything together in one document. (...) MONOCULAR O Ꙩꙩ, BINOCULAR O Ꙫꙫ, DOUBLE MONOCULAR O Ꙭꙭ, and MULTIOCULAR O ꙮ are used in words which are based on the root for ‘eye’. The first is used when the wordform is singular, as ꙩкꙩ; the second and third are used in the root for ‘eye’ when the wordform is dual, as ꙫчи, ꙭчи; and the last in the epithet ‘many-eyed’ as in серафими многоꙮчитїй ‘many-eyed seraphim’. It has no upper-case form. See Figures 34, 41, 42, 55."
- prmoustache 4y agoLiterally everyone in choir: we have boooobs!
- bityard 4y agoToday, I wrote a document by hand containing a new symbol that only looks like genitalia if you squint really hard. Where do I apply to have it included in unicode so that it can be digitized properly?
- koala_man 4y agoCan you reuse 𓂸 or 𓂺?
- 0xbadcafebee 4y agoAnd for years we've just been using eggplants!
- 411111111111111 4y ago( ﾉ ≧ ∇ ≦ ) ﾉ ﾐ ┻ ━ ┻ 〜 ( ꒪ ꒳ ꒪ ) 〜 ( ༎ຶ ෴ ༎ຶ )
- GekkePrutser 4y agoLol I never knew those existed. Apparently they're egyption hieroglyphs but it really makes me wonder the meanings of them now :) I also wonder how these didn't become insanely popular overnight, like the famous eggplant.
- Akronymus 4y agoReuse rectangle or rectangle? (Seems to not render for me, win 10, chrome)
- lucumo 4y agoRule-lawyering wise-asses try to mess with many policies. It's rarely a sensible indictment of a policy, nor is it very effective. Anyone dealing with such people just ignores them.
- fluoridation 4y agoWhat's the criterion that includes the document in the tweet, but excludes the document referenced by the GP?
- koboll 4y agoOkay, let's take a look at the context where the multiocular o was used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O I see that near it, there is an ef (Ф) with a very tall stem. Why should that not be included as a standard unicode character? Surely it is used more often than the multiocular o. You may say "it's a decorative flourish", which is of course true, but so is the multiocular o. Should we allow every conceivable decorative flourish into unicode? What is the standard for where flourishes become distinct characters?
- layer8 4y ago> Unicode's mission is to make every document "roundtrip-able". Only for characters from existing coded character sets.
- bhk 4y agoCataloging every doodle ever drawn inline with text by anyone at any time in history would exhaust any finite set of code points.
- kadoban 4y agoFor as inclusive as that mission is, it seems weird to me how limited in certain areas unicode is. For instance, people use peach emoji since there isn't one for butt, eggplant since there's no penis, etc. This doesn't contradict the stated goal exactly, but it seems against the spirit of it at least.
- yakireev 4y agoOne could argue that emoji should have never been added to Unicode in the first place. Peaches and butts are images, pictures, illustrations, whatever - but they are not characters. There's no writing system which has a colored drawing of a peach as a character.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- eternityforest 4y agoBut that doesn't change the fact that most people use them snd like them, and there is not much technical disruption. They just chose practicality over purity.
- yakireev 4y agoMost people (me included) like funny cat videos and send funny cat videos. Shall we include some to Unicode? I mean, this ship has long sailed, but that was a mistake nevertheless. Not everything has to be a unicode character.
- kadoban 4y agoIf there were specific funny cat videos that were culturally relevent, maybe. For example I could see there being an emoji for keyboard cat.
- eternityforest 4y agoThat wouldn't be practical. It would make fonts too big, and videos aren't a thing that goes inline in text. However, I could totally see some kind of open source GIF library of a few hundred meme videos and pictures, to standardize the "Reply with a GIF" thing in some P2P chat ecosystem, and maybe it could have a new URL scheme for referring to OpenMemes images.
- tzs 4y agoIf that was once its mission, it was clearly abandoned long ago. They rejected Klingon characters on the grounds that it has low usage for communication, and that many of the people who do communicate in Klingon use a latinized form. ꙮ seems to just be a fancy way of writing О. I haven't seen anything that says it has a different meaning. The arguments for excluding Klingon seem to apply even more so to ꙮ.
- mananaysiempre 4y agoIf you look through the old mailing list postings, the oft-left-implicit problem with Klingon (as well as Tengwar, Everson’s [EDIT: misspelling] pet project) is that it may get people into legal trouble (even though in a reasonable world it shouldn’t be able to). So in the unofficial CSUR / UCSUR they remain. A weird solitary character from the 1400s isn’t subject to that, and even if it’s a mistake it’s probably not worth breaking compatibility at this point (I think the last such break with code points genuinely changing meanings was to repair a mistaken CJK unification some time in the 00s, and the Consortium may even have tied its own hands in that regard with the ever-more-strict stability policies). Similarly, for example, old ISO keyboard symbols (the ⌫ for erase backwards, but also a ton of virtually unused ones) were thrown in indiscriminately at the beginning of the project when attempting to cover every existing encoding, but when the ISO decided to extend the repertoire they were told to kindly provide examples of running-text (not iconic) usage in a non-member-body-controlled publication. (Crickets. The ISO keyboard input model itself only vaguely corresponds to how input methods for QWERTY-adjacent keyboards work in existing systems—as an attempt at rationalization, it seems to mostly be a failed one.)
- lifthrasiir 4y ago[EDIT: Removed a section about the now-fixed typo] > I think the last such break with code points genuinely changing meanings was to repair a mistaken CJK unification some time in the 00s, and the Consortium may even have tied its own hands in that regard with the ever-more-strict stability policies[.] Not exactly, the last break happened between Unicode 1.1 and 2.0 and the new CJK Unified Ideographs Extension A block still contains unified characters. The main reason for break was that both Hangul and CJK(V) ideographs required tons of additional code points and it became clear that 16-bit code space is dangerously insufficient; by 1.1 there was only a single big block of unassigned code points from U+A000 to U+E7FF (18,432 total), and there were 4,516 and 6,582 new Hangul and CJK(V) ideographs in 2.0 (11,098 total).
- shp0ngle 4y agoThe thing is, this is just a decorative way to write “o”. It’s not a specific letter by any definition. I can’t speak of other letters that were added in the same batch in 2007. Some of them seam meaningful, I donno, I don’t speak old church slavonic (although I am told it sounds like Croatian, which I understand a little) http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3194.pdf
- lmm 4y agoMeanwhile one still can't roundtrip regular Japanese without some kind of funky out-of-band signalling. By itself this kind of thing is harmless, but it speaks to poor prioritization from Unicode.
- School-Cotton 4y agoWhy can’t it round-trip Japanese?
- lmm 4y ago"Han Unification" - in Unicode many Japanese characters are represented as Chinese characters that look different (and subjectively ugly). The Unicode consortium's answer is that you're supposed to use a different font or something when displaying Japanese, which is pretty unsatisfying (e.g. if you want to have a block of text that contains both Japanese and Chinese, you can't represent that as just a Unicode string, it has to be some kind of rope of segments with their own fonts, at which point frankly you might as well just go back to bytes-with-encoding which at least breaks very clearly and visibly if you get it wrong).
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoYou can use the deprecated language tag control codes to distinguish unified code points. It is unlikely to be well supported but it is there.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lifthrasiir 4y agoThis is incorrect. I think you defined round-trip as something else, but some character set A providing a round-trip compatibility with other set B means that B can be converted to A and back to B without a loss. And it is one of Unicode's explicit goals to provide a round-trip compatibility with major encodings including Japanese ones. Han unification only means that when you convert Japanese encodings (B) to Unicode (A), it is not distinguishable from non-Japanese encodings converted to Unicode. This means that the Unicode text doesn't always follow domestic conventions without out-of-band signaling or IVD or so. But if you know that the text was converted from a particular encoding, you can perfectly recover the original text encoded in that encoding.
- School-Cotton 4y agoThe artist Prince changed his stage name to an unpronounceable symbol for a few years. It appears in more than one document. Should it be added to Unicode?
- caf 4y agoProbably. Maybe you can propose it.
- sloonz 4y ago> so what harm is there in one codepoint no one will ever need? Fonts bloat (do you want a font with 1 million characters in it ? I don’t. Do you want to have to install 1000 fonts having 1000 characters each to be sure to cover all the Unicode table ? I don't). Lots of issues for everyday programmers (how do you handle weird unicode characters in your validation code ?) potentially leading to security issues (bypassing validation rules by close-but-different characters, phishing…)
- rhplus 4y agoBy the original reasoning, shouldn’t every fancy illuminated character from medieval manuscripts get its own codepoint?
- IshKebab 4y agoThat isn't Unicode's mission though. To get new characters added you have to show that people use it or would use it if it were available.