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Unicode 6.1 Released
An anonymous reader writes "The latest version of the Unicode standard (v. 6.1.0) was officially released January 31. The latest version includes 732 new characters, including seven brand new scripts. It also adds support for distinguishing emoji-style and text-style symbols and emoticons with variation selectors, updates to the line-breaking algorithm to more accurately reflect Japanese and Hebrew texts, and updates other algorithms and technical notes to reflect new characters and newly documented text behaviors."
Yes, lolcats are a standard now.
Raise your hand if you couldn't code a parser that detects those characters and takes appropriate action, such as popping bidi characters.
I'd love to be able to write IPA when discussing pronunciation, or actually write out words in other languages, ohm character for discussing electronics, pound and yen signs for currency ... Hey, even a bigger whitelist than what we have now would be great!
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Seriously, emoticons? Who ever thought it a good idea to include those in a standard? Should we have an encoding for hearts as dots over lower case i as well? And little horseys, too? And y with a big tail that wraps around to the front of the word?
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
You know that this is the exact situation that Unicode AVOIDED, doesn't you?
Now we have one standard with 3 different representation. Those replaced literaly thousands of standards. Yep, sometimes doing that new standard works.
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