Re: Three modest proposals

From: Mark Davis ☕ (mark@macchiato.com)
Date: Sun Apr 03 2011 - 20:44:15 CDT

  • Next message: John W Kennedy: "Re: Three modest proposals"

    This was much better as an April Fool's prank.

    There was a good reason for a couple of cards (jokers): compatibility with
    widespread usage in existing standards (the Japanese emoji). It should have
    gone no further.

    It was bad enough to for certain ISO NBs to push in the superfluous 52 cards
    (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F0A0.pdf) [Unicode
    members didn't want them].

    But then that mistake is taken now as a precedent to add tarot cards. What
    is next?

       - http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jass?
       - Localized versions of cards on
       http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F0A0.pdf
          - All the locale digits?
          - All the different languages' abbreviations for A, K, Q, J?
       - Risk countries?
       - Monopoly tokens? (
       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Deluxe_Monopoly_Tokens.jpg)
       - Word of warcraft characters?

    There is no doubt that it is useful for people to have images associated
    with tokens for the many thousands of games. There is no need at all for
    these to be encoded characters in plain text.

    Mark

    *— Il meglio è l’inimico del bene —*

    On Sun, Apr 3, 2011 at 17:27, John W Kennedy <jwkenne@attglobal.net> wrote:

    > On Apr 3, 2011, at 7:13 AM, Julian Bradfield wrote:
    > > I don't read Western playing-card literature, but I have most
    > > English-language mah-jong books, and a fair selection of other
    > > languages (including Chinese), and I've never seen mah-jong tiles used
    > > in a way that says to me "this is intended as a plain text character",
    > > rather than "this is a picture embedded in the line of text". That
    > > usage seems exactly analogous to children's word-picture books - will
    > > Unicode encode pictures of ducks, pigs and so on because people publish
    > > children's books in which they use pictures to replace words? (OK, I
    > > know many of them are already in the emoji characters, but let's not
    > > go there again.)
    > > I am surprised if the same is not true of playing cards.
    >
    > I’m inclined to agree with your general argument, but with 58 playing cards
    > already enrolled today, it’s hard to be terribly negative about adding 23
    > more to finish the set. (If the current set were limited to the modern deck,
    > I don’t know that I’d call for the Tarot deck to be added, but since the
    > Knight cards are already included, the current state of affairs seems to be
    > an intrinsically unstable situation.)
    >
    > --
    > John W Kennedy
    > "Sweet, was Christ crucified to create this chat?"
    > -- Charles Williams. "Judgement at Chelmsford"
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >
    >



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