back to article You can wipe those smiley faces off: Unicode technical website is going to be out for 'a couple of weeks'

The Unicode Consortium's technical documentation website went belly up on Friday, two days after the organization said the planned March 2021 release of Unicode 14.0 will be delayed six months due to COVID-19. The Mountain View, Calif.-based non-profit oversees the Unicode Standard, a character encoding scheme that allows …

  1. Dwarf

    Hieroglyphics

    Can’t we just forget the whole pile of mostly meaningless hieroglyphics and go back to using words - just like cave men have before us ?

    1. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge
      Joke

      Re: Hieroglyphics

      Yes, I for one would be happy with Loweroglyphics

      1. Kane
        Joke

        Re: Hieroglyphics

        "Yes, I for one would be happy with Loweroglyphics."

        Everyone knows you don't get Loweroglyphics in these waters.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hieroglyphics

      "Cave men" - an obsolete term if I ever read one - drew schematic pictures on cave walls. It's not the best of examples.

      1. choleric

        Re: Hieroglyphics

        They have, however, managed to serve their data reliably for millennia, which is more than can be said for the Unicorn Consortium.

        1. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

          Re: Hieroglyphics

          They're quite capable of blowing their own horn

          1. yoganmahew

            Re: Hieroglyphics

            You forgot your glyph of exclamation!

            1. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

              Re: Hieroglyphics

              I! don't! have! anything! to! do! with! Yahoo!

              1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

                Re: Hieroglyphics

                Who does if they can avoid it?

      2. Dwarf

        Re: Hieroglyphics

        OK, it was early on Monday morning and perhaps my meaning wasn't fully apparent or got stuck somewhere between my brain and the keyboard.

        What I was trying to say is that cavemen (and presumably cavewomen) used to draw pictures, but we all moved on from that. I find it ironic that thousands of years later we are going back to drawing pictures again.

        This makes me wonder if the archaeologists of the future looking at our digital records will be able to figure out what that specific Unicode character was trying to explain to the other party. Personally, I think we are going backwards with pictures.

        The only good thing about this compared to the Egyptian wall carvings is that at least bits of the wall won't have crumbled, so we would hope to have an accurate record, or possibly no record when someone takes down that specific web site, but that is a very different thing about historical records.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Hieroglyphics

          What I was trying to say is that cavemen (and presumably cavewomen) used to draw pictures, but we all moved on from that. I find it ironic that thousands of years later we are going back to drawing pictures again.

          I don't think that is the consortium's fault. IKEA started it.

          :)

          1. keith_w

            Re: Hieroglyphics

            Forest Gump's fault

        2. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

          Re: Hieroglyphics

          >cavemen ... used to draw pictures, but we all moved on from that.

          What if they were just the Powerpoint presentations of their day?

          Ugg will give presentation on value proposition of hunting mammoth

          Although without transitions they presumably had to all move to the next cave for each slide

        3. Someone Else Silver badge

          Re: Hieroglyphics

          A picture is worth a thousand code points....

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Hieroglyphics

      What a character.

    4. Psmo
      Alien

      Re: Hieroglyphics

      Interesting choice of term given that hieroglyphics predate Unicode by millenia, and are still interpretable today.

      1. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

        Re: Hieroglyphics

        Hier today and hone tomorrow

  2. GrumpenKraut
    Happy

    a data center that has experienced a catastrophic failure

    ... after realizing what kind of data it holds.

  3. Steve Crook

    I'm looking forward to Eamonn Holmes

    telling us that COVID is transmitted by UNICODE in text messages sent over 5G.

    1. Yet Another Anonymous coward Silver badge

      Re: I'm looking forward to Eamonn Holmes

      Or the Donald decrying UNicode as a UN effort to force us all to use China characters

  4. ysth

    Also in Unicode 13, "People Hugging" (01FAC2), which I can't show here, because..."The post contains some characters we can’t support"

    1. not.known@this.address

      Ah, the real reason the release is delayed

      Social Distancing!

      They have to rework all those emojis showing people closer than 2m to anyone else, or enjoying outdoor activity for longer than 1 hour, in a park or near a beach...

  5. Robert Grant

    Maybe they created a new database with the wrong default character set. Happens to the best of us!

  6. Alan Brown Silver badge

    Backups?

    'nuff said....

  7. Jamie Jones Silver badge

    https://unicode.org/main.html if you inadvisedly click through the browser warnings.

    ... because nothing is worse than those evil hackers swapping around smilie codes!

  8. Inventor of the Marmite Laser Silver badge

    We need a PROPER comedian

    Someone like Glyph Rhys Jones

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Geo-redundancy..? Backups...?

    Nothing should go off-line these days....

    ...however, not paying the bill would do it...!

  10. EnviableOne

    Is it just me

    Or is it a big hole in unicode that there is no standard symbol for the windows icon

    beacuase you can't guarentee things will display ÿ in wingdings and

    not everyone knows the key with the logo is refered to as the "windows" key

    1. Anonymous Coward
      1. Someone Else Silver badge

        Re: Is it just me

        Any relationship between Windows and math(s) is purely accidental.

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