By @edent · ebook HTML unicode · 2 comments · 300 words
By and large, the English language doesn't use diacritical marks. Even our loanwords are stripped of them; we drink in a cafe rather than the more pretentious café. This has a consequence for HTML and, by extension, eBooks. As a quick primer, modern computing gives us two main ways of displaying a letter with an […]
Continue reading →By @edent · emoji php unicode · 4 comments · 350 words · read ~166 times.
I was noodling around in PHP the other day and discovered that this works: <?php $🍞 = "bread"; echo "Some delicious " . $🍞; I mean, there's no reason why it shouldn't work. An emoji is just a Unicode character (OK, not just a character - but we'll get on to that), so it should […]
Continue reading →By @edent · ActivityPub fediverse i18n mastodon unicode · 35 comments · 650 words · read ~256 times.
We live in the future now. It is OK to use Unicode everywhere. It seems bizarre to me that modern Internet services sometimes "forget" that there's a world outside the Anglosphere. Some people have the temerity to speak foreign languages! And some of those languages have accents on their letters!! Even worse, some don't use […]
Continue reading →By @edent · law legal unicode · 11 comments · 400 words · read ~229 times.
OK, first off, you have to read this amazing judgement about whether Walker's Sensations Poppadoms count as a potato-based snack for VAT purposes. Like most judgements, it is written in fairly plain and accessible language. The arguments are easy to follow and it even manages to throw in a little humour. But if you read […]
Continue reading →By @edent · a11y accessibility Latin romans tts unicode · 12 comments · 800 words · read ~2,871 times.
How would you read this sentence out aloud? "In Hamlet, Act Ⅳ, Scene Ⅸ..." Most people with a grasp of the interplay between English and Latin would say "In Hamlet, Act four, scene nine". And they'd be right! But screen-readers - computer programs which convert text into speech - often get this wrong. Why? Well, […]
Continue reading →By @edent · coding programming unicode · 11 comments · 400 words · read ~227 times.
Why do most programming languages use the / character when we have a perfectly good ÷ symbol? Similarly, why use != instead of ≠? Or => rather than →? The obvious answer is that the humble keyboard usually only has around 100 keys - and most humans have a hard time remembering where thousands of […]
Continue reading →By @edent · HTML unicode webdev · 6 comments · 550 words · read ~12,212 times.
Originally posted as part of HTML Hell's advent calendar. While browsing Mastodon late one night, I came across this excellent blog post called HTML is all you need to make a website. It describes a few websites which are pure HTML. No CSS and no JS. And I thought… do you even need HTML to […]
Continue reading →By @edent · dns domains punycode unicode · 8 comments · 500 words · read ~586 times.
You know how it is, you buy one silly domain name and then you get an idea for loads more! A few weeks ago, I got https://⏻.ga/ - I think I'm the first person to get a domain name which uses a glyph from the Miscellaneous Symbols Unicode block. How exciting! And that got me […]
Continue reading →By @edent · domains emoji i18n NaBloPoMo unicode · 1 comment · 700 words · read ~361 times.
Like all good geeks, I have far too many domain names that I acquired for interesting projects which never took off. My latest is a bit different though. https://⏻.ga/ That's "Unicode Power Symbol Dot Gabon". Because why not. Regular readers will know that I helped get ⏻ and several power symbols into Unicode. When I […]
Continue reading →By @edent · art unicode · 5 comments · 1,750 words · read ~800 times.
I present to you, dear reader, a spiral containing every1 Unicode 14 character in the GNU Unifont. Starting at the centre with the control characters, spiralling clockwise through the remnants of ASCII, and out across the entirety of the Basic Multi Lingual Plane. Then beyond into the esoteric mysteries of the Higher Planes2. Zoom in […]
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