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Comment by igravious | Hacker News Reader

And "MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING" is not overkill?

Seems to devalue the entire standard and project.

edit: Unicode should be universally useful. This is not. I would love to be convinced otherwise however .....

You want each character, on it's own, to be universally useful? That's a pretty high standard, there wouldn't be very many characters to meet it and include in the repertoire.

Pretty much every character that exists is useful to some people some time, but not every person all the time.

... and emoji, in particular, are actually very useful (and well-used) for average every-day communication amongst huge numbers of people.

Obviously some are going to be more useful than others, but it would be quite difficult to find a subset of them that are obviously so completely useless that they should be dropped.

The Unicode consortium's practice of just adopting complete scripts wholesale is vastly simpler and works out quite well in practice.

That's not what I meant. Universal was a too strong, agreed. But the sentiment I meant to express was that codepoints should not be whimsical, tied to any one particular proprietary company or sub-group.

Even if this specific character isn't of any particular use, the fact that you can now represent every character in Webdings in Unicode is kind of nice, I guess.

What's so special about Webdings? I would have thought that Unicode be used for representing the common natural language alphabetic, ideographic and symbolic glyphs that had widespread communal and historical use. Not for encoding some proprietary font by some corporation, that's not how I see it. I'd ask not to be voted down if you disagree, just explain to me why you think otherwise.

"...symbolic glyphs that had widespread communal and historical use"

The answer lies within your question.

I do not have a problem with generic dingbats that have a genuine historical authenticity. I would have a problem with something designed less than 20 years ago that seems to have very arbitrary and whimsical glyphs as is the case with Webdings which came into being in 1997. It is even more troublesome and annoying that it is the product of some corporation and not a shared cultural artifact.

From today I will use "MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING" as the representation of sending a patch upstream.

🕴

To be fair, I think it's supposed to be a stylized exclamation mark.

Unicode should be easy to standardize. It's never going to be, but making arbitrary decisions on what's 'useful' or not just makes the process harder by making everyone's blood pressure go up every single time that kind of decision has to be made.

Frankly, one of the biggest advantages of having so many codepoints is being able to burn some of them on less-useful shit simply so the standards folk can move on.

I definitely see what you are saying. I suppose after you've included the glyphs for the world's natural languages and common shared symbols you're going to move into more contentious areas. I'd prefer them to be a bit more conservative though but I see your point of view. What if we start having well known brand logos like the ubiquitous golden arches as codepoints. I would argue they've gone too far here and broken with the spirit of the enterprise.

> What if we start having well known brand logos like the ubiquitous golden arches as codepoints.

I think trademark laws would stop that. I'm not sure, but I don't think anyone else is, either, so the uncertainty would prevent it from happening.

I do see what you're saying, and it would be a slap in the face if a script for a fictional language were standardized before every script for every living language made it in to the standard. However, and this is where you and I differ, I don't really see that much difference between emoticons and other little-used typographical marks living languages sometimes use. Face it: The smiley face is typed a lot more often than the per mil mark (like the percent mark, except 'per thousand' instead of 'per hundred'):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_mil

So the middle finger is rude. People are rude sometimes, and the middle finger is a well-established way of showing that, myths about its origin aside:

http://www.snopes.com/language/apocryph/pluckyew.asp

In the future, Man in Business Suit Levitating will be the only form of communication.

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