2002-09-12 11:11 UTC One, two, thr-ooooh, U+20E0 COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE BACKSLASH!
I'm supposed to be researching numbering systems that we are going to have in the CSS3 lists module (such as hebrew, armenian, georgian, cjk-ideographic, hiragana, katakana, hiragana-iroha, katakana-iroha, simp-chinese-formal, simp-chinese-informal, trad-chinese-formal, trad-chinese-informal, japanese-formal, japanese-informal, hangul, hangul-consonant, cjk-heavenly-stem, cjk-earthly-branch, arabic-indic, persian, devanagari, gurmukhi, gujarati, kannada, malayalam, bengali, tamil, telugu, thai, lao, myanmar, khmer, hangul, hangule-consonant, ethiopic-halehame, ethiopic-abegede, ethiopic-numeric, ethiopic-halehame-am, ethiopic-halehame-ti-er, ethiopic-halehame-ti-et, urdu, oriya...) so that we can make sure that CSS3 explicitly says what they mean, including UNICODE codepoints, moduli, generating algorithms and so on.
This requires me to spend some time looking up characters in the UNICODE code charts. Unfortunately there are so many really funny characters that I keep getting very distracted.
I'm starting to get favourites. For example, my preferred additional enclosing diacritic has got to be
U+20E4 COMBINING ENCLOSING UPWARD POINTING TRIANGLE. It's similar to U+25B3 WHITE
UP-POINTING TRIANGLE
but it's a combining character so you can add it to other ones (such as U+0021 EXCLAMATION MARK
, not to be confused with U+01C3
LATIN LETTER RETROFLEX CLICK
which looks remarkably similar) to get warning signs!
And then you have the characters that just have cool names. For instance, U+203D INTERROBANG or U+0FBF TIBETAN KU RU KHA BZHI
MIG CAN
(looks very similar to
a U+203B REFERENCE MARK
).
There are alphabets which just
look like squiggles, there are alphabets that look like diagrams. There are characters that really should just be clipart, there are characters with surprising side notes (U+2619 REVERSED
ROTATED FLORAL HEART
BULLET :
a binding signature mark
) and there are sets of
characters whose mere existence acts as a subtle symbol of man's desire to control nature (U+2744
SNOWFLAKE , U+2745 TIGHT
TRIFOLIATE SNOWFLAKE
, U+2746
HEAVY CHEVRON SNOWFLAKE
— and you thought that there were an infinite number of different snowflake patterns!).
Anyway. U+263A WHITE SMILING FACE :
have a nice day!