Re: Smiles, faces, etc

[Patrick Andries]

David Starner wrote:

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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.

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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.

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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 dispplay is still not universal.

Oh, I see, no Unicode characters now...lest old hardware breaks down, right ? ;-)

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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.

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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 ?

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 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