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A comment on Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018). Parent comment

Re:Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018) by hkai on Thursday April 30, 2020 @09:07AM (#23030373)
I find myself disagreeing with your agreement because of the examples of symbols that are clearly not text.

One of them, BROKEN CIRCLE WITH NORTHWEST ARROW, could actually be used for the external link symbol if it were mirrored!

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Re:Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018) by gimboland on Thursday April 30, 2020 @09:18AM (#23030462)
In an RTL language, you don't even need to mirror it.

Or, to put it another way: if you think it needs to point to the right, is that because the text you read flows that way?

This then makes me wonder if the large portion of the world's population that read right-to-left find the currently widely-used external link symbol (as discussed in the article) a bit jarring.

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Re:Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018) by yorwba on Thursday April 30, 2020 @09:32AM (#23030581)
> makes me wonder if the large portion of the world's population that read right-to-left find the currently widely-used external link symbol (as discussed in the article) a bit jarring

The symbol appears mirrored in RTL languages on Wikipedia, e.g. this random Arabic article: https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D8%B3%D9%86...

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Re:Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018) by kyle-rb on Thursday April 30, 2020 @11:21AM (#23031816)
Or does it point to the right because a new tab will open, to the right of the current one?

Come to think of it, are tabs aligned toward the right side when the browser/OS is set to an RTL language?

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