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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 4/11/24 11:47, Asmus Freytag via
Unicode wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:dc27ca30-1fe8-4c15-b828-ea04556e3680@ix.netcom.com">
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<p><font face="Candara">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.</font></p>
<p><font face="Candara">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.<br>
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<p><font face="Candara">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.</font></p>
<p><font face="Candara">~mark<br>
</font></p>
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