External Link Symbol

[Mark E. Shoulson]

On 4/11/24 11:47, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:
>
> Given that "link" is now available as encoded character, I don't feel 
> the warm and fuzzies about a principled stand to restrict the 
> "external link" to an external image. There's nothing inherent in the 
> distinction that absolutely must be reflected in a disparate decision 
> on encoding for these two.
>
> In other words, it strikes me as silly. If it had been added when 
> first proposed, we'd probably see widespread adoption by now. That 
> said, it's easy enough to realize with a site-wide image.
>
The external link character almost seems like a no-brainer for me.  Once 
Wikipedia started using an image, it became extremely well-known and 
recognizable and started popping up all over the place, usually the 
exact same image or something very similar.  While it's true that HTML 
and links are almost definitionally not "plain text" (it's a link), that 
line has never been really bright (you can tell because we argue about 
it all the time here.)  WP's external link symbol is way closer to plain 
text and has far more usage than most of the map symbols we've encoded, 
and probably more than emoji as well.  As Asmus said, if it had been 
added when proposed, we'd be seeing widespread usage, and indeed we're 
seeing widespread usage even though it wasn't added, with various SVG 
images etc. That's how you manufacture usage to justify encoding.  To 
me, this is one of the most encoding-worthy symbols I've seen out there, 
and I'm astonished it still isn't encoded.  But that's just me.

~mark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20240411/1e083748/attachment.htm>