Re:How a comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode charac...
by onion2k on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:11AM
(#11959875)
But it should not be part of a plain text format.
What is "plain text format" though? If 'text' isn't limited to Western ASCII characters (which it very obviously shouldn't be considering many people use other character sets), then the idea of a text standard should be to encode all the glyphs people use, so "plain text format" becomes a canonical list of all the communicative symbols in all languages. That's what Unicode aims to be.
In my opinion, if they're used for communication, it doesn't seem unreasonable that such a canon of characters should include universal iconographic symbols like the standby icon.
What is "plain text format" though? If 'text' isn't limited to Western ASCII characters (which it very obviously shouldn't be considering many people use other character sets), then the idea of a text standard should be to encode all the glyphs people use, so "plain text format" becomes a canonical list of all the communicative symbols in all languages. That's what Unicode aims to be.
In my opinion, if they're used for communication, it doesn't seem unreasonable that such a canon of characters should include universal iconographic symbols like the standby icon.