Re:Announcing Unicode 7.0
by smackfu on Tuesday June 17, 2014 @10:12AM
(#7904498)
That's not really the right question. We already have small pictures in fonts, just look at Wingdings or Webdings. Unicode is just assigning them to unique code points so they can be represented in a document without requiring the font to be specified.
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And you consider Wingdings a good thing in the first place?! It's an abomination that should never have happened.
But it did happen. And it has been used a lot.
So, for the sake of interoperability and the ability to read back these documents in a future Unicode-only world, we have to encode them.
Never said that, but the current situation is that we have glyphs that people are using in documents that can't be represented in Unicode, and that's pretty much the main reason there are Unicode revisions in the first place.
Why would documents using Webdings stop working today? I'm pretty sure they still work. That's a lame excuse. Considering your point, wouldn't it have been the chance to clean up this mess with unicode instead of piling up shitty icons in a standard?