Aw: Re: External Link Symbol

[Doug Ewell]

Gabriel Tellez wrote:

> Talk ignoring the point I was trying to make. Unicode’s own website
> used the wrong character because they couldn’t use the correct one.

They’re not using a “character” at all. They’re using a glyph from one of those icon fonts, which map all kinds of graphics that aren’t necessarily suitable for encoding as characters (such as the old Twitter logo) to code points in the PUA. That’s standard practice for many web sites, to make handling of small icons easier.

Unicode isn’t a standard for encoding symbols per se; there are many ISO standards that fill that role. Unicode is a standard for encoding characters that appear in plain text, many of which happen to be symbols. A symbol that appears on an HTML web page is not necessarily one that appears in plain text; remember what the “ML” in HTML stands for.

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Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org