On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 10:55:04PM -0500, Patrick Andries wrote:
> >The regular way; the most common way; the way people actually use.
> >
> Well, because there is no other way with a keyboard. But what do people
> do with a pencil ? What is the way people actually draw smileys then ?
> Tilted 90° ?
People add these things to written text? I've never seen it, and it
doesn't sound like you have, either.
> >Unless Unicode is willing to dedicate several hundred characters to
> >these, there will be many similies that will be unencoded.
> >
> Which is obviously an argument to encode none (or only those that are
> "legacy"). Now, granted the problem is to determine what is the set that
> could be encoded and here ISO/Unicode hasn't got its work cut out for
> itself : there is no prior approved set.
I misstated myself; the problem is not that the number is large, is that
it's openended. "(-." is a valid smiley, as is ":-;".
> I admit that there is a practical limitation as far as inputing these
> characters is concerned, but then how many Unicode characters has
> Microsoft (?) added to its [US ?] keyboard.
(Yeah, Microsoft. One heck of keyboard, though a little fragile for my
tastes. If I could just get one of the old steel keyboards with all the
bucky bits in a split layout . . .)
But I can enter LATIN CAPITAL LETTER HVAIR when I need it. People aren't
going to pull up the character map when they need a smiley - they'll
just type it in.
> >So once most systems support it - in what, 4-5 years? - programs may
> >autoreplace the smilie.
> >
> They already do. I'm not really sure I understand you. Are you aware
> that I didn't need to use the «regular way» to get ☺ and :-) ?
One out of two ain't bad, I guess. That was garbage on the screens of
some of the subscribers, though - UTF-8 display is still not universal.
The point, though, was that it will take a year, maybe more, to
standardize the characters. It will take another couple years for new
systems to regularly provide fonts for them. And it will take yet
another couple years for people to have regularly upgraded their OS to
the newest system.
> Are we really obsessed about byte size ? The effect is not net : you
> would now have characters which can take different appearances (font
> variants if you want). They can then be straight up (normal instead of
> tilted), coloured or even animated.
Huh? If you want that, you're going to have to transmit inline graphics.
You can't animate glyphs in a font. You can color a current ASCII smiley
with HTML as easy as you can any new smiley, and a color drawing of a
face is just that, a color drawing, not text.
> I wonder sometimes if the largest obstacle in the encoding of smileys as
> characters is not the "universal" normalization process itself.
The problem is, they are fundamentally ASCII text art, that appear only
in computer systems, and only there as ASCII text art. There's no prior
art to point to, except for systems that clearly display them as
graphical objects, not text.
-- 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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