Unicode Snowman for You

I don't know if I'd entirely call it bike-shedding; if they left it as a snowman, people would start to make comments like "Oh those unprofessional Rubyists, putting silly snowmans willy-nilly into code!"

Then again, they might not. But a check seems more 'professional.'

Different top-level domains have different rules about what characters they'll allow in domain names. If a registrar has policies that prevent homograph registration, Firefox (and other browser vendors) will add them to the default whitelist.

If the .cn registrar has a policy that says "only ASCII and CJK characters will be allowed in domain names", then it's pretty unlikely that a homoglyph attack will work, and browsers will show the properly-decoded string as the domain name.

(and sure enough, my copy of Firefox sets "network.IDN.whitelist.cn" to true)

Awww, yours looks much nicer. The page doesn’t specify a font so I guess it’s just using the default font of the browser (or, failing that, any font that contains the Unicode character; I would be surprised if many do). My default font is Helvetica Neue.

– edit: I did some digging around. There are a few fonts on my computer which contain a snowman. My browser uses (for whatever reason) Hiragino which is a family of Japanese fonts that comes standard with every Mac. Your nice snowman is the one in Arial Unicode. Here are all the snowmen on my system: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/snowmen.png

Best one imo. Our snowman has a fez!

I have nothing but sympathy for the Unicode Consortium which finds itself in a difficult situation. The main purpose of Unicode is to contain all characters of all the world’s writing systems, not to be a directory of the world’s symbols. Yet there clearly are some symbols which absolutely have to be part of Unicode. Punctuation, for one.

Where to draw the line? That’s not easy.

I don't know, but it would sure make it easier to add a bare-bones media player widget or a weather report widget to a spartan desktop interface such as xmonad. Plus your widgets would be automatically restyled to be aesthetically consistent with the rest of the interface!

Unicode 6.0 has: 1F512 and 1F513 closed and open locks. Also 1F511 is a key, 1F510 is a key and lock, and 1F50F is a lock with ink pen(?).

Unicode 6.0 also adds ffwd and rewind symbols but frustratingly leaves out pause and play. Plenty of triangles for play (which may or may not match the new additions). But two vertical lines or boxes are going to be very inconsistent from font to font in looking like a pause symbol.

My biggest peeve? The standard power button symbol on every computer and almost everything else these days, the IEC 5009 standy icon, also recognized as the power symbol in IEEE 1621. You can approximate the IEC 5010 on/off button with some other things, but it won't reliably look the same, and won't look at all like the IEC 5009 icon.

Pause, play, and power buttons are WAY WAY WAY more useful (i.e. necessary) in text than a nail polish icon.

I'm holding out for Mr Potato Head combining characters.

> ...or play/pause/ffwd/rev symbols.

I'm not sure about "pause", but Unicode has had U+25B6 BLACK RIGHT-POINTING TRIANGLE for "play" for some time, and Unicode 6.0 introduces U+23E9 BLACK RIGHT-POINTING DOUBLE TRIANGLE for "fast-forward" and U+23EA BLACK LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE TRIANGLE for "rewind".

The symbol was  [Edit: Image link http://i.imgur.com/Pf0Br.png ]

The domain name was .ws