David Starner wrote:
>
>People add these things to written text? I've never seen it, and it
>doesn't sound like you have, either.
>
I wonder how you know this. I do write smileys on piece of papers.
>>>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 ":-;".
>
Yes and so is the ideographic collection : it is open-ended.
>>>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.
>
Oh, I see, no Unicode characters now...lest old hardware breaks down,
right ? ;-)
>
>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.
>
This applies to any new character.
>>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,
>
What ? A straight up smiley ? A bold smiley ? A different design ?
> you're going to have to transmit inline graphics.
>
No, that can be left to the receiving end (stylesheet, font settings, etc.).
Enough (for me).
P. Andries
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Feb 14 2002 - 23:07:43 EST