On Thu, Feb 14, 2002 at 11:48:04PM -0500, Patrick Andries 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.
I inferred that from your question about how people write them. I
apologize if that was a mistake inference.
> >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 ? ;-)
If your goal to communicate, then you pick your tools wisely. Gratitious
use of Unicode smileys with people who may not be running the latest
system is not productive to communication.
> >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.
True, and many people who might try to get a new character encoded think
again, and look for another solution. A character that is part of many
ancient classics is worth waiting to encode. An ephemeral character
like most smileys just isn't.
> >Huh? If you want that,
> >
> What ? A straight up smiley ? A bold smiley ? A different design ?
You have bold smileys. If you want animations, color.
> >you're going to have to transmit inline graphics.
> >
> No, that can be left to the receiving end (stylesheet, font settings, etc.).
But modern systems don't have the capablity to animate or color (in more
than one color) characters. That's graphics.
For a proposal, you'd need examples of the character being used in
print, as a character and not a graphic. Do you have any examples?
-- 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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