Re: Where is the white frowning face?!

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Sun Apr 14 2002 - 18:14:16 EDT


Munzir Taha <munzirtaha@hotmail.com> wrote:

> When I tried to insert a smiling face from a Unicode font (Arial
Unicode
> MS), I met across a white (U+2639) and a black (U+263A) one. Also, I
found a
> black frowning face (U+263B).

Actually, they are:

U+2639 WHITE FROWNING FACE
U+263A WHITE SMILING FACE
U+263B BLACK SMILING FACE

> Where is the white frowning face (Why not U+263C)?

Probably nobody ever submitted a formal request for it, and it probably
doesn't appear in any legacy character sets with which Unicode needed to
maintain round-trip capability. (For that matter, U+263A and U+263B are
in MS-DOS CP 437, but where did U+2639 come from?)

It's not really a goal of Unicode to encode every possible smiley,
emoticon or other pseudo-text iconic image. The ones that are already
encoded are there for compatibility reasons. Despite my frequent use of
"\u263a" on this list, the "standard" Unicode smiley is probably U+003A
U+002D U+0029.

(Please, let's not start a big long off-topic thread about this!)

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California



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