☃ | Hacker News Reader

☃

xn--n3h.net

142 pointsarthurk36 comments

Open articleView on HN

Just some from my bookmarks...

He should start a webmail service--imagine trying to give out an email address @☃.net.

"Yeah, my e-mail address is tom at indifferent-snowman-wearing-a-fez.net"

The email address formerly known as gmail.

And then maybe, a few years down the line 'the address'

I hereby declare this historic event the start of Web 3.0 ;)

Well, we have a crash. Why not have a web 3.0?

Everyone from now on can have smiley face domain names.

3.0? That's doing a great disservice to Indifferent Snowman Wearing Fez! This is at least Web 42.0

how do you register a domain name with a unicode character in it?

It's really just http://xn--n3h.net/

http://mct.verisign-grs.com/conversiontool/convertServlet?in... converted it to PUNYCODE.

Your browser needs support for IDN to make this work; in Firefox it's the option network.enableIDN

Anyone else noticed how rather rude that character looks at a small size when viewing on the HN front page? ;-)

Why is that the same unicode character, in the same machine, can has two (or maybe more) different designs? Check this screenshot: http://i38.tinypic.com/2pqqntj.jpg

(FF, Windows XP)

Unicode specifies a "character", which is somewhat an abstract entity and is different from "glyph", which is a visual representation of the character. One character can be mapped to different glyphs. Usually glyphs are determined by fontset. In your case I assume glyphs of the snowman character in the fontset for the text entry and in the fontset for the text display are different.

It is a common experience for East Asians; the same CJK kanji character sometimes has different glyphs for Chinese and Japanese. It is still quite a hassle to fix all fontset to show them right (I gave up.)

I remember reading how paypal.com with unicode was a big problem for a while.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/unicode_url_ha...

Am I missing the joke here?

I'm sort of confused as well it was kind of cool and amusing but I don't really understand why it has had so many votes all day...

Yes.

So...what's the joke?

Something about this site jumping the shark.

it's very funny

lulz I get it now!!

That snowman is a real square.

For me on Windows XP:

Google Chrome: Square (Fail)

IE7: Square (Fail)

Opera 9.52: Snowman (Pass)

Firefox 2.x: Snowman (Pass)

I don't know a lot about unicode, does anyone know if there is a solution to the "I'm doing the obvious wrong thing by rendering an incorrect glyph" problem? It seems like it would be pretty cool to have rendering engines report back code points that they were unable to render, allowing the application to signal to the user that something is wrong, or even better yet, offer to launch a service to find a font that has that code point.

we're pre alpha testing a practical application of unicode if anyone's interested.. the tool uses intertubes to help ourselves learn more language.. it'll get better when we learn how to incorporate IDN.. no, we're not that smart yet, but yes, we are open source :)

I thought Arc didn't support Unicode. Maybe it just passes through.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=111100

That's the beauty of UTF-8.

Until you treat the string as a list of characters instead of as a list of octets. Then you corrupt your data horribly.

That's the horror of UTF-8.

At text size it looks more like BADGER TRIUMPHANT.

On a different note, I guess this means arc now supports unicode? I haven't been keeping up with the latest.

lol this is so cool, i had no idea unicode was so "creative"

☃ FTW

Would have been cooler using UTF-8 in the source. HTML escape feels like cheating.

E2 98 83 FTW

Here's an example of the snowman with UTF-8: http://unicoders.org/.

So I guess this is it for Hacker News?

thats a killer domain name ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com