4 ms·
They mention using it as a punctuation mark, but surely it must be distinct from other punctuation marks to deserve its own unicode point, further they must dif
by benj111 3y ago
They mention using it as a punctuation mark, but surely it must be distinct from other punctuation marks to deserve its own unicode point, further they must differ from each other to deserve their own unicode points.
Surely this deserves to be on the font rendering side, not the unicode side?
- derefr 3y agoI've seen fleurons used in blog posts as end of article mark. It's sort of a generic sign-off / chop, stuck inline to the last paragraph of the text. Usually, when used this way, they'll be styled in a different, lighter color than the text before them. Obviously, an "end of article" marker isn't a thing that needs to exist — you know the article is over because there's no more article! But people putting extra "stuff" inline at the end of the last paragraph of an article, has a long history in printing anyway. Because people can be extra, and I suppose Unicode should support encoding the extravagancies of existing historical documents.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y agoIt's not always obvious the article is over these days. Sometimes they run sneaky ads afterwards.
- benj111 3y agoOk, an end of article marker is fine. But it doesn't mean we need multiple code points meaning the same thing. An a is an a regardless of whether it serif or sans, whether it has the thing on the top like a floppy d (edit: the unfortunate comparison wasn't intentional).
- bazoom42 3y agoThey probably “deserve” to have unicode code points because they existed in pre-unicode character sets.
- jahewson 3y agoLooks like quite a few of these arrived with the addition of the historical Manichaean script in which “there are several punctuation-marks to indicate headlines, page-divisions, sentence-divisions, and others”.
- compiler-guy 3y agoThe term "fleuron" describes something more like the term "emoji" than it does a particular punctution mark. Yes, fleurons are often used for ending sentences. But they function more as a decoration that happens to go there than as a period or question mark. Sure, I can imagine a single emoji in all of unicode, just pick a different font for whatever particular one you want to use. But much easier and more logical to have a wide variety of them available to you that roughly matches your current font.
- benj111 3y agoA smiley emoji has a distinct meaning to sad emoji. So each should have its own code point. If you want your emoji to look should be left to the font. Do fleurons have distinct meanings?
- compiler-guy 3y agoDo all the block elements and geometric shapes have their own distinct meanings, or do they just happen to be useful for different situations? https://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/025.html https://www.w3.org/TR/xml-entity-names/025.html The custom of a font including several fleurons has existed for centuries, dating almost to the invention of fonts themselves.
- crazygringo 3y agoI think it's mostly to handle backwards compatibility with a handful of common pre-existing fonts including Symbol and Zapf Dingbats. Because of those fonts, these particular marks already had widespread digital usage that needed to be maintained.
- WorldMaker 3y agoFor an interesting sense of "backwards compatibility" with the planet's past encodings, Unicode decided in concert with Microsoft to encode all of Windows' classic Wingdings 1/2/3 in various places in the Unicode planes. Some of them combined with Variation Selector 16 now double as emoji, so there's an interesting through line between ancient Wingdings and modern emoji. But also yes, some of Wingdings was far more decorative than most of what Unicode prefers to encode, it only gets a pass for how ubiquitous Wingdings is/was.