I [broken] Unicode!

[pne]

A ha ha ha!

Comments

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

I think I need one of those

[ladyortyger.livejournal.com]

'Splain.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I presume you know basically what Unicode is -- a character set with lots and lots of characters, theoretically all characters to write any language you wish to imagine, as well as specialised characters such as some mathematical symbols and dingbats such as snowmen. One of those characters is the heart symbol (I think both filled and outline versions are available), famous on LiveJournal through the HTML entity ♥ (as in "heart suit"). So Unicode lets you write "I ♥ Unicode".

Unfortunately, Unicode isn't supported completely by all machines (in fact, I'd venture to say that it probably isn't supported completely on anything commercially available). Often, the problem is with fonts: the user doesn't have fonts available that include glyphs for all Unicode characters.

Typically, the operating system will replace a character for which it has no glyph in any available font with some "replacement" character -- e.g. a question mark, an empty box, or a question mark in a diamond. (The last happens to be the example glyph for U+FFFD REPLACEMENT CHARACTER: �.)

So "I � Unicode" is, to me, a wry comment that says something like "I love Unicode; unfortunately, support for it -- especially font support -- is still too unreliable, and using it will often mean that at least some viewers will only see gibberish or replacement symbols instead of my lovingly-crafted Unicode".

[ladyortyger.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's what I was thinking. Cool! Funny.