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 accent. The first is simple - encode every single accented letter as a separate "pre-composed" character. So è (U+00E8), é (U+00E0), ê (U+00EA, and ë (U+00EB) are all stored as diff…
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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 be fine to use anywhere. Emoji work perfectly well as function names: function 😺🐶() { echo "catdog!"; } 😺🐶(); Definitions: define( "❓", "huh?" ); echo ❓; And, well, pretty much everywhere: class 🦜 { publi…
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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 English letters at all!!! A decade ago, I was miffed that GitHub only supported some ASCII characters in its project names. There's no technical reason why your repo can't …
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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 closely, you'll see there are a few instances where an errant question-mark pops up: From context, it is pretty clear the word should be "flour" but is rendered as "?our" - …
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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, because I didn't just type "Uppercase Letter i, Uppercase Letter v". Instead, I used the Unicode symbol for the Roman numeral 4 - Ⅳ. And, it turns out, lots of screen-readers have …
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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 alternate characters are. Some programming fonts attempt to get around this with ligatures. That allows the user to type <= but have the font display ≤ Are there any modern programming languages whic…
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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 make a website? A few hours later, I launched the NO-HT.ML website. Proving, once and for all, that you don't need HTML to make a beautiful responsive, and useful website which everyone will love. Go t…
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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 wondering… what other abuses of the Punycode algorithm can I whack into DNS? Well, here's some I whipped up using FreeNom - they offer free domain names on the .ga TLD (and a few others) and are very liberal in accepting P…
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@font-face { font-family: "power"; src:…
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I present to you, dear reader, a spiral containing every 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 Planes. Zoom in for the massiveness. It's a 10,000x10,000px image. Because the Unifont displays individual characters in a 16x16px square, it is quite legible even when printed …
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Because I'm genetically pre-disposed to watch every piece of Star Wars content ever created, I signed up for a free trial of Disney's newest streaming service. As part of onboarding, it asked me to create a profile name. This is typically done so that multi-user households can have separate profiles and preferences. Mum doesn't have her princess stories disrupting Dad's suggestions. And Junior doesn't see what filth their parents are watching late at night. All the better to build up detailed…
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Welcome to acronym city! The Court of Appeal of Brussels has made an interesting ruling. A customer complained that their bank was spelling the customer's name incorrectly. The bank didn't have support for diacritical marks. Things like á, è, ô, ü, ç etc. Those accents are common in many languages. So it was a little surprising that the bank didn't support them. The bank refused to spell their customer's name correctly, so the customer raised a GDPR complaint under Article 16. The data subj…
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