5 ms·
> I sometimes wonder how many of its 149,813 ‘characters’ any one human is likely to use, and suspect for most that’s in the low hundreds or less. In other new
by avgcorrection 3y ago
> I sometimes wonder how many of its 149,813 ‘characters’ any one human is likely to use, and suspect for most that’s in the low hundreds or less.
In other news. How many Hungarians are ever going to be writing in Thai?
EDIT: Used the wrong quote here. Fixed.
> All those ‘characters’ enable deliberate misuse, where visual similarities are exploited to spoof people over identity or worse.
Communities like mathematicians are more to blame for that than Unicode.
Unless maybe you want a Latin script/Cyrilic/Greek etc. unification (for the relevant characters).
> We still do a great deal in life using text that can be searched rapidly and readily. Sometimes it pays to obfuscate that so that only humans reading it will understand what it says.
I guess that would work in the same way that rot13 encoding (like spoilers) does; not worth to decode since only a few specially interested people do it. But it’s not like it’s difficult if anyone puts some effort in. But yeah, such nerdisms can definitely be useful as long as they remain a subcultural thing (presumably always will be).
- yannis 3y agoNow why that statement about mathematicians?
- avgcorrection 3y agoMaybe my history is rusty. Some of the weird bold (and even font like Gothic) came from mathematics because mathematicians use them in a semantically significant way (like Gothic G is a different signifier than just G; you can’t “plaintext” the former to G and still have it mean the same thing).[1] The general preference of Unicode is to relegate style-looking things to markup. That’s certainly their stance on superscript digits (the ones in Unicode are just for compatibility). But for some reason (again rusty history) these format-looking characters had to be included as separate code points. The point is that Unicode has to deal with how text has been used by various communities in order to be the text encoding standard to rule them all. [1] Unlike in prose where bold and such is just for emphasis. And at worst you can use informal markup (similar to MarkDown) and convey the same thing.
- yannis 3y agoYou can think of mathematical symbols as representing math objects. They are fairly new in unicode and yes different alphabets can be used. Like the symbol for infinity is from the Hebrew alphabet. Unicode gives them different codepoints so that screen readers and eventually one day renderer engines can typeset them correctly. Of course if you try to understand some of the more esoteric math subjects, is now mostly diagrammatic. I dont understand them to be honest!
- dotancohen 3y ago> Like the symbol for infinity is from the Hebrew alphabet. Are you perhaps not confusing infinity with the symbol used to denote the cardinality of infinite sets? If the infinity symbol really comes from the Hebrew alphabet I'd love to hear more.