On Sat, 18 May 2002, Doug Ewell wrote:
>and the VCR front-panel icons come to mind.
>[...]
>Anyway, as long as such characters are deemed appropriate for Unicode, I
>was wondering recently about the "lock" and "unlock" symbols,
>represented by a closed and open padlock respectively. [...] Is it worth
>putting one together?
For what it's worth, my intuition says "yes". Like VCR (more like abstract
"player control", nowadays) symbols, the lock and unlock symbols have
permeated into language, broadly defined. They no longer are just
arbitrary vogue icons for whatever, but have become established symbols
for security (and "locking", whatever that might be in a specific context;
unmodifiability, when working with transactionable systems, immediately
springs to mind). They seem to be relatively widely spread, over multiple
applications, providers and the associated textual documentation. They
would seem to be on their way to becoming bona fide characters. At the
very least I think they are quite close to the requirements for encoding
imposed by Unicode/ISO 10646.
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy@iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
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