adam's grump of the day: icons in fonts (was Re: web-assets-httpd stuck in limbo?)

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2014-01-16 at 15:41 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 09:13:03AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > Then get the Unicode people sign off on treating your special special
> > characters as text, otherwise it's just an abuse of the system. If all
> > the people who want to do this get together and get a set of agreed upon
> > generic icon 'types' defined as Unicode code points - 'U+B540 is a
> > preferences icon', or what the heck ever - then fine. As long as people
> > are just making it up as they go along, they're 'embracing and
> > extending'. 
> 
> Well, it does seem that they're using the Private Use Areas, which are
> specfically reserved for basically this purpose.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas 

Well, kinda. That still only works as long as you can be sure all your
users are actually going to use your Special Font, though, because there
is basically zero chance that any other font will contain the 'correct'
symbols for your usage at the same codepoints in its PUA. I'd still
argue it's really not appropriate to use it in any case at all where
people might not actually want to use your
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
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