On 8/27/2016 10:15 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
Ken Whistler wrote:
I would contend that encoding wildly popular and extensively used
little pictographs as characters makes a whole lot more sense in the
abstract than encoding box-drawing graphic pieces for completely
obsolete screen technology ever did.
Though to be fair, the screen technology was a lot less "completely
obsolete" in 1991, when the box drawing characters were encoded
(Unicode 1.0), than it is today.
They came into the draft in the period from 1988 to 1990; during that
period, dialogs using "text mode" displays were common for many
applications, not just pure terminal emulation.
To demonstrate that it was "universal" Unicode had to show that it could
be used to replace the entire range of actively used character
encodings. Just as the same universality argument is what drove the
initial acceptance of emoji. And will drive acceptance of a whole host
of other symbols and characters, no matter how well they stack up
against the purity of principle.
A./
