Open Sarcasm Fighting Copyrighted Punctuation

pinkushun writes "SarcMark is a copyrighted punctuation mark, that claims 'It's time that sarcasm is treated equally!' Pretty damn cheeky while they're charging for their software, which only inserts their punctuation through a hotkey. Open Sarcasm is destroying SarcMark by advocating a new punctuation mark (not displaying here properly — alt+U0161) as the new open and free sarcasm symbol. Either way, this will be one interesting turnout. With bad unicode support across the web, displaying the characters properly might be an issue. PS Left out sarcastic end sentence as Slashdot doesn't display the U0161 character."

Comments

Overloading Unicode

[Anonymous Coward]

Please please please please please, dot NOT overload Unicode by assigning a punctuation to U+0161. This is the code for a small s with caron, and is necessary for writing Czech, Estonian, Finnish, Slovak, and other languages. If you want to support a new character, put it in the Private Use Areas. There's over 130,000 code points that are set aside, just for this sort of thing. It's like those idiots trying to support the new Indian Rupee symbol, but end up calling in to question the interpretation of all sorts of data.

Here's the rules:

1. Every assigned code point has a defined meaning. If you are trying to do ANYTHING that means that code point should be interpreted any other way, it is WRONG!

2. Reserved (ie, Unassigned) code points absolutely can NOT be used for information interchange. Reserved code points are two meetings away from being assigned code points, and using them is just as bad as using a code point wrong.

3. There is a place where you can play around. It's called the Private Use Areas. They are three blocks: U+E000-U+F8FF, U+F0000-U+FFFFD, and U+100000=U+10FFFD. You can literally do whatever the heck you want there, no questions asked.

Re:Pfft.

[komap]

We clearly need a new symbol to indicate irony as well.

so use it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_mark#Irony_mark

About the Ethiopian Sarcasm Mark Temherte Slaq

[surveyork]

At opensarcasm.org they mention the Ethiopian sarcasm mark, the Temherte Slaqî. It's pretty much indistinguishable from the Spanish initial exclamation mark. I'd show it here, but Slashdot doesn't support anything beyond basic ASCII, apparently.