Ben Buchanan wrote:
Think about the heart symbol. It's in UTF as "black hearts suit" or
something. But people use it to say "I [heart] unicode". Would it make
any sense to read out "I black hearts suit unicode"? The symbol has
been used to indicate the word "love".
actually I wouldn't use U+2665 BLACK HEART SUIT to represent "love" as
it is what its name suggests, the symbol used to represent one of the
four suits commonly used on playing cards. Its name and position in the
Misc. symbols block indicate that.
If you wanted to use a symbol to represent "love" you would use a
different unicode character, maybe U+2764 HEAVY BLACK HEART in the
Dingbats block or one of the alternative Dingbats.
So what I'm getting at is that the name of the symbol may not be the
same as the concept it communicates. Do people truly write "No. 12
Somewhere Street" meaning "Numero 12 Somewhere Street"? No, they mean
"Number 12 Somewhere Street" (well, in English-speaking nations
anyway). In the same way, they might say "#12 Somewhere Street"... do
they want people to say "right, so you live at hash twelve Somewhere
Street"?
From a purist's point of view, people should never say "I [heart]
whatever" since that's not what the Black Hearts Suit symbol is for.
But we know that people do use it this way and will keep using it this
way.
Hence my opinion that there should be an optional method for declaring
a specific interpretation of the symbol (character, glyph, entity
wossname). I hope that's a clearer statement of what I was driving at
:)
cheers,
Ben
--
Andrew Cunningham
Research and Development Coordinator
Vicnet, Public Libraries and Communications
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston Street
Melbourne VIC 3000
Australia
andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au
Ph. 3-8664-7430
Fax: 3-9639-2175
http://www.openroad.net.au/
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http://www.vicnet.net.au/
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