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Comment by glitch | Hacker News Reader

(1) I acknowledge that the author already states that "[they are] quite well aware that this uses Unicode not ASCII."

(2) Having said that, as a request to everybody for future text-based creations, could we please stop referring to non-ASCII text as "ASCII". Using characters that aren't in ASCII really shouldn't be referred to as ASCII. Pretty please.

(3) The more generic label of "text QR" or "text-based QR" would be better, in my opinion. In this particular situation, saying "Unicode text QR" or "Unicode QR" would also be appropriate.

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Ok, we'll change the title above to Text QR.

Please let's discuss something more interesting than the name now.

It seems like "ASCII QR" is a play on "ASCII art", which is an existing compound word with a specific history and meaning that the term "text art" simply does not have. When I think of ASCII art, it reminds me of old plain-text video game FAQs, which often included elaborate ASCII art throughout. "Text QR" or "Unicode QR" does not have that association.

Of course; but ASCII art only uses ASCII characters. Back in the BBS days you could use ANSI to give you different characters and colors; but that was called ANSI, not ASCII.

"Unicode QR" is probably the best term for what's happening here.

UniQRde

And "ANSI" is also a misnomer.

It's typically used to refer to certain Microsoft 8-bit code pages, like Windows-1252, that extend 7-bit ASCII to 8 bits. My understanding is that these code pages were proposed as an ANSI standard, but never adopted. ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) is similar but not identical to Windows-1252 (Latin-1 has control characters in some positions where Windows-1252 has printable characters -- and Unicode inherits those control characters from Latin-1.)

You can't fight semantics. Words take on new meanings all the time. "Literally" and "nonplussed" used to mean one thing, now they mean the opposite thing.

"ASCII" is becoming ubiquitous for "Of or relating to printing characters in the style of a terminal shell/CLI"

Just look at the package that was the #1 link yesterday - Asciinema or whatever.

I bet you a dollar Asciinema isn't actually printing ASCII encoded characters.

i wonder why they call for Unicode usage when the extended ascii 219 - 223 could do the same

e: lol why downvoting the inquisitive reader? this community sheeesh. hacker news seems a misnomer more than anything.

Depending on the codepage ... extended ASCII is just as much a misnomer here as ASCII in the original post.

Okay how about codepage 437 then

Because ASCII is an American-centric standard that needs to die, in favor of more inclusive standards?

Unicode is already not common enough, last thing that IMHO is needed are _more_ programs that don't implement well accepted, well tested standards.

The meaning of words change. Selfie used to mean a self-taken photo of yourself. Now people call every photo of a person a selfie.

ASCII used to mean a specific encoding, but its most widely known usage was in ASCII Art. And so the meaning of the word changes: ASCII starts to mean “ASCII art” even when it’s Unicode.

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