On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 08:56:25PM -0500, Patrick Andries wrote:
> >They are already encoded in Unicode, using two or more Unicode
> >characters... using a colon and a closing parenthesis (I personally
> >prefer the version with a "dash" nose) is all you need.
>
> Methinks «We know what you need» is a bit patronizing.
That doesn't mean it's not right. There's a lot of absurd solutions
created by people with problems, and a lot of solutions to problems that
don't exist.
> >There are a couple of "real" smileys too, but some modern emailers
> >actually recognize the regular form
>
> the « regular »... the contrived way you mean.
The regular way; the most common way; the way people actually use.
> >PS: ... and at the end of the day, Unicode is a _text_ encoding
> >standard ... :-)
>
> Yea, yea and this punctuation ;-) isn't text right ? Why ? Because
> there is no character ;-) !
See the FAQ. There's no character MALTESE IE, or SPANISH LL, either, but
they are still usuable in plain text.
Unless Unicode is willing to dedicate several hundred characters to
these, there will be many similies that will be unencoded. And unless
Microsoft is willing to add it to their keyboards, most people won't be
able to use it directly. So once most systems support it - in what, 4-5
years? - programs may autoreplace the smilie. So IM's will send 3 bytes
across the net to replace three byte-sized ASCII characters, with the
same net effect, but having succesfully broken backward compatibility
with anybody using older hardware or software.
-- David Starner / Давид Старнэр - starner@okstate.edu Pointless website: http://dvdeug.dhis.org What we've got is a blue-light special on truth. It's the hottest thing with the youth. -- Information Society, "Peace and Love, Inc."
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