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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 rootlocus on Thursday April 30, 2020 @09:20AM (#23030474)
> This explanation mirrors the rejection rationale: you don't need a symbol to be a Unicode character if the document is already rich text;

No, that's not the rejection rationale. The rejection rationale isn't about having access to image tags or CSS. It's about hypertext (click link, go to another text) vs having text (can't click link, no other text). If that was the rationale, they wouldn't allow emojis in unicode, because you could insert them as images.

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Re:Why isn't the external link symbol in Unicode? (2018) by hunter2_ on Thursday April 30, 2020 @07:48PM (#23037613)
Sorry, let me rephrase in the way that I did in another comment: it seems that to be a codepoint, it needs to be useful in plain text scenarios.

Emoji are useful (arguably I guess) in plain text scenarios because they exist to convey additional information about an author's emotion, and that author might use plain text. The external link symbol is not useful in plain text scenarios because it exists to convey additional information about an author's preceeding hypertext, and that author isn't using hypertext.

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