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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

Tangentially related: I think this is the first time I see an emoji URL “in the wild“, not as a proof of concept. I don't know how to feel about it.

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> Tangentially related: I think this is the first time I see an emoji URL “in the wild“, not as a proof of concept. I don't know how to feel about it.

I've seen colour emojis used in emails to grab my attention (as opposed to something plain black on white)... And I know I don't like it.

Whether the emoji is colour or not, depends on the combo of Browser+OS+Font. On Linux, pretty much every mainstream browser renders emojis in colour. On Windows, it's a bit more complicated: Windows 7 always renders emojis in black and white regardless of the browser, whereas Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 render them in colour. Unless it's Internet Explorer, where they are in black and white again.

A LOT of sites also do 'on-the-fly' unicode emoji swap-outs for little png images. Twitter and Facebook are a good examples of this. That way the emoji is always in colour regardless of the platform.

at least on Linux, it's much less a factor of the program used, as long as it uses freetype (i.e. all programs since 2000 except for crappy Java programs), and much more a factor of simply what fonts are installed by default on the particular distribution. on Arch for example, no emoji fonts are installed by default. in fact, no graphical fonts at all are installed by default, but installing a browser will pull in a ttf-font, by default ttf-dejavu (which also does not contain emoji characters).

I saw an emoji-decorated reddit thread about the new release of a library I really like. I commented how maybe emojis are not appropriate for serious code releases, I was ignored.

The next release was also announced with an emoji-decorated title...

I guess I'm old already at 32

I feel older at 31. I did not know that emojis existed, till now...

> I guess I'm old already at 32

According to HN, you're past tech retirement age. So yes, you should feel old.

Really not a fan. Makes the url impossible to type on desktop.

Win+. on Windows 10 at least. But then you still have to know the name of the emoji.

Will go one further: the use of emoji at all defeats the purpose of having a language and an alphabet.

You say that, and yet Egypt became an empire whose history has been saved 4000 years later thanks to a pictogram based language.

Egyptians hieroglyphics are phonograms though, not [very loosely defined] ideograms -- I thought that was the point about their translation, that people wrongly assumed they were pictorial ideograms.

How so? Why can't they be complimentary?

As the other comment said, why can't they be complementary? Emojis are great for handling subtext and seem to (partly) offer a solution to Poe's law. That being said, I too can't take anyone who uses emojis in his comments seriously.

That could be a feature.

Cmd+Ctrl+Space brings up a searchable emoji selector on MacOS.

That's genius, had no idea, thanks for the tip

It's a blog site, not a coder's Rest API. I'm trying to think of the last time I actually typed out the URL to any blog post.

It's not really all that unusual to see URLencoded non-ASCII in URLs, especially if you frequent non-English sites.

Yeah, it’s also a common example for why showing punycode for IDNs is a super bad idea.

e.g., take fluege.de (a flight comparison site) and flüge.de (a competing flight comparison site). The plain-ascii transscription of ü is ue.

Now, flüge.de can’t buy fluege.de, or use that domain, and has no alternative domain.

But if you show the punycode version in the URL bar, you just increased the phishing risk significantly, because you’ve trained users to enter their payment data on a xn-randomblabla.de page.

interesting; i didn't know you can do that...

   urldecode(%F0%9F%A4%94) =

would be pretty awkward to see the urlencoded version (e.g. on paper and source code), but I guees it just works as far as UI is concerned.

Can you have emoji domain xn--?? What about and emoji tld?

> have emoji domain xn--??

Yes. See http://xn--i-7iq.ws

Edit: HN does not let me enter emoji characters.

Wow, didn’t know this was possible.

What’s next, emoji in stock symbols? Might as well...

When we start writing legal documents in emoji we will have taken hieroglyphics full circle.

I believe Neal Stephenson essentially anticipates this in Anathem.

It's just unicode.

And I think it's good browsers will change it into the the dashed version.

Because: www.аррlе.com/

Browser vendors have instituted a variety of different rules for this problem, include at least:

1. Decide (policy, enacted by humans) for each TLD if its registry has rules that will prevent abuse, if so whitelist this TLD and show IDNs as text for this TLD, everything else is punycode.

2. Algorithmically detect "confusing" IDNs and show punycode instead for those.

FWIW - If you feel that's a bug worth reporting, drop an email to the site admins at hn@ycombinator.com so they're aware of it.

To be honest, it's probably for the best, it's just that this is one of those edge cases where it was used for a legitimate purpose.

I'm fairly sure that the HN comment system has been built back in the early to mid 2000's and hasn't been updated since.

You must have missed the recent additions of 'unvote'/'undown', deleting posts (I am not sure anymore, but don't think this was possible a few years ago), limiting edit time, much fewer (in my experience: no more) 'no such thing' errors when the cache expired, collapsible comment trees, etc.

These are all small improvements that made it a lot better. That the look hasn't changed for as long as I'm here, I'm quite happy about. If the alternative is something with loads of whitespace and Javascript like Reddit, Skype, etc., then please let us not update "the comment system from the early to mid 2000s".

Which to be honest, is one of the great things about it.

It's clean, it's simple, it's fast, and more importantly it's NOT phpBB.

It supports unicode. And indeed, for a while you could post emoji, until they were added to filters disallowing them. You can still find old posts containing them, rendering correctly.

It is, technically. However, most TLDs forbid this.

Note that the availability of emoji domains is limited. As of August 2017, there were eight top-level domains for which registration of emoji domain names was possible, all of which are ccTLDs: .cf, .fm, .ga, .gq, .ml, .tk, .to, and .ws.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain

Meanwhile, the total number of TLDs was 1543 TLDs as of April 2018. As of May 2017, there were 255 Country code top-level domains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...

8 / 1543 ~= 0.5% of all TLDs support emoji.

8 / 255 ~= 3% of all ccTLDs.

> Can you have emoji domains in punicode?

Yes. See this wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji_domain

There are no punicode TLDs, but there are unicode ones, and punicode ones could definitely exist.

By example for the unicode ones http://nic.xn--gckr3f0f/en.html (a japanese unicode gtld)

https://angel.co had (peace-emoji).com for years.

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