How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters

Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by systemfreund on Thursday June 23, 2016 @04:13AM (#11959515)

From the Unicode 9.0.0 announcement [0]:

> Important symbol additions include:

> 19 symbols for the new 4K TV standard

I am wondering, why did they add symbols for a standard which will become obsolete eventually?

[0]: http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode9.0.0/

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by paler on Thursday June 23, 2016 @04:31AM (#11959585)

For the same reason that they also include symbols for many obsolete (dead) languages and writing systems, as well as (per a comment above) a character used by the 1959 IBM 1401 computer (https://github.com/shirriff/groupmark). The need to be able to discuss a certain technology in writing does not disappear just because it is out of general use.

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by Someone on Thursday June 23, 2016 @04:43AM (#11959620)

They have symbols for languages that _have_been_ obsolete for centuries, if not millennia.

Also, if popular, these kinds of things tend to outlive their technology. For prime examples, look at http://graphemica.com/, http://graphemica.com/%F0%9F%96%AA, http://graphemica.com/%F0%9F%96%AB, and http://graphemica.com/%F0%9F%96%AC (to be fair, I think that is overdoing it)

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Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac... by TorKlingberg on Thursday June 23, 2016 @04:48AM (#11959639)

I found the proposal with the new symbols here: http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15238-n4671.pdf

They were proposed by Japan, and intended for TV electronic program guide. If it makes you happier, one of the symbols is for 8K.

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