Post by @aartaka@merveilles.town

Everyone, I no longer use Unicode smart punctuation. Thanks to smolweb Guidelines <https://smolweb.org/guidelines.html#:~:text=Use%20emoticons%2C%20not%20emojis> and Wikipedia editing guidelines, I realized that my extensive Unicode use is impairing some older programs and simpler browsers. I'd like to avoid that. So

- Ellipsis is three periods "..."
- Em dash is three dashes "---"
- Bullet is a single dash "-"
- Double and single ASCII quotes

I will most certainly be inconsistent in that and I'll have to retroactively fix many (most) of my posts that I moved to smart punctuation before. But such is life.

NLP becomes harder with these ambiguous conventions, but it never was easy to work with human text in all its variety anyway. Sigh.

Guidelines for a smolweb

smolweb.org promotes simple unbloated web. It provides resources to actors who want to participate.

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Artyom Bologov

@aartaka@merveilles.town 8 hr. ago

It seems I’ve circled back to using Unicode after all. True, my former self said that it’s less accessible to older devices, referring to smolweb guidelines. But

• smolweb guidelines only mention emoji and other recent-ish additions to Unicode. My use of Unicode is mostly smart quotes and other punctuation. Rarely emoji, and only in inconsequential places. So it’s safe-ish.

• We have to aim for a better world here. Unicode enables people to have their computers in their language and be properly represented on the Web. Between that and making implementations slightly easier by sticking to 7-bit ASCII, I pick representation of diverse people. I don’t want to be the person holding back the progress (and here the “progress” is used in its actual meaning, and not in whatever meaning techbros and MAGA-ists use.)

Note that I still use Classic English Punctuation (like in the last sentence and here—with punctuation going before quotes and parens.) Which is a queer and conservative choice. Maybe switch to Logical Punctuation too? Later, maybe. But right now I have to fix all the mess I wroke with my website while purging smart punctuation.

#theVent

Konrad Hinsen

@khinsen@scholar.social 2 hr. ago

@aartaka Unicode is perhaps the most important progress computing has seen over the last decades. From a user's perspective of course.

screwlisp

@screwlisp@gamerplus.org 16 min. ago

@khinsen @aartaka
What are the other contenders? EBCDIC? I often wonder about the Xerox-universe idea of having installable system fonts all work-the-same-way, but I never really looked into it.

Konrad Hinsen

@khinsen@scholar.social 11 min. ago

@screwlisp For home/desktop users in Europe and North America, the path of progress was ASCII -> ISO Latin -> Unicode. Elsewhere, different starting points ended up at Unicode as well. EBCDIC never became mainstream, even IBM didn't use it for their PCs.

@aartaka

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