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There's no argument here. We could say it's only for script and alphabets, ok. It includes many undeciphered writing systems from antiquity with only a small h

There's no argument here. We could say it's only for script and alphabets, ok. It includes many undeciphered writing systems from antiquity with only a small handful of extent samples. Should we keep that, very likely to never be used character set, but exclude the extremely popular emojis? Exclude both? Why? Aren't computers capable enough? I used to be on the anti emoji bandwagon but really, it's all indefensible. Unicode is characters of communication at an extremely inclusive level. I'm sure some day it will also have primitive shapes and you can construct your own alphabet using them + directional modifiers akin to a generalizable Hangul in effect becoming some kind of wacky version of svg that people will abuse it in an ASCII art renaissance. So be it. Sounds great.

riwsky 2y ago
Like how phonetic alphabets save space compared to ideograms by just “write the word how it sounds”, the little SVG-icode would just “write the letter how it’s drawn”
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Right. Semantic iconography need not be universal or even formal to be real. Think of all the symbols notetakers invent; ideographs without even phonology assigned to it. Being as dynamic as flexible as human expression is hard. Emojis have even taken on this property naturally. The high-5 is also the praying hands for instance. Culturally specific semantics are assigned to the variety of shapes, such as the eggplant and peach. Insisting that this shouldn't happen is a losing battle against how humans construct written language. Good luck with that.
simonh 2y ago
No, no, no, no, no… So then we’d get ‘the same’ character with potentially infinite different encodings. Lovely. Unicode is a coding system, not a glyph system or font.
- kristopolous 2y ago
  Fonts are already in there and proto-glyphs are too as generalized dicritics. There's also a large variety of generic shapes, lines, arrows, circles and boxes in both filled and unfilled varieties. Lines even have different weights. The absurdity of a custom alphabet can already be partially actualized. Formalism is merely the final step This conversation was had 20 years ago and your (and my) position lost. Might as well embrace the inevitable instead of insisting on the impossible. Whether you agree with it or not won't actually affect unicode's outcome, only your own.
  - simonh 2y ago
    Unicode does not specify any fonts, though many fonts are defined to be consistent with the Unicode standard, nevertheless they are emphatically not part of Unicode. How symbols including diacritics are drawn and displayed is not a concern for Unicode, different fonts can interpret 'filled circle' or the weight of a glyph as they like, just as with emoji. By convention they generally adopt common representations but not entirely. For example try using the box drawing characters from several different fonts together. Some work, many don't.
    - kristopolous 2y ago
      You can say things like the different "styles" that exploit Unicode on a myriad of websites such as https://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi?text=Hello https://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi?text=Hello are not technically "fonts" but it's a distinction without a meaningful difference. You have script, fraktur, bold, monospace, italic...
      - simonh 2y ago
        Fraktur is interesting because it’s more a writing style, verging in a character set in its own right. However Unicode doesn’t directly support all of its ligatures and such. None of this is in any way justification for turning Unicode into something like SVG. Even the pseudo-drawing capabilities it does have are largely for legacy reasons.

riwsky 2y ago

Like how phonetic alphabets save space compared to ideograms by just “write the word how it sounds”, the little SVG-icode would just “write the letter how it’s drawn”

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
kristopolous 2y ago
Right. Semantic iconography need not be universal or even formal to be real. Think of all the symbols notetakers invent; ideographs without even phonology assigned to it. Being as dynamic as flexible as human expression is hard. Emojis have even taken on this property naturally. The high-5 is also the praying hands for instance. Culturally specific semantics are assigned to the variety of shapes, such as the eggplant and peach. Insisting that this shouldn't happen is a losing battle against how humans construct written language. Good luck with that.

simonh 2y ago

No, no, no, no, no… So then we’d get ‘the same’ character with potentially infinite different encodings. Lovely. Unicode is a coding system, not a glyph system or font.

kristopolous 2y ago
Fonts are already in there and proto-glyphs are too as generalized dicritics. There's also a large variety of generic shapes, lines, arrows, circles and boxes in both filled and unfilled varieties. Lines even have different weights. The absurdity of a custom alphabet can already be partially actualized. Formalism is merely the final step This conversation was had 20 years ago and your (and my) position lost. Might as well embrace the inevitable instead of insisting on the impossible. Whether you agree with it or not won't actually affect unicode's outcome, only your own.
- simonh 2y ago
  Unicode does not specify any fonts, though many fonts are defined to be consistent with the Unicode standard, nevertheless they are emphatically not part of Unicode. How symbols including diacritics are drawn and displayed is not a concern for Unicode, different fonts can interpret 'filled circle' or the weight of a glyph as they like, just as with emoji. By convention they generally adopt common representations but not entirely. For example try using the box drawing characters from several different fonts together. Some work, many don't.
  - kristopolous 2y ago
    You can say things like the different "styles" that exploit Unicode on a myriad of websites such as https://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi?text=Hello https://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi?text=Hello are not technically "fonts" but it's a distinction without a meaningful difference. You have script, fraktur, bold, monospace, italic...
    - simonh 2y ago
      Fraktur is interesting because it’s more a writing style, verging in a character set in its own right. However Unicode doesn’t directly support all of its ligatures and such. None of this is in any way justification for turning Unicode into something like SVG. Even the pseudo-drawing capabilities it does have are largely for legacy reasons.