• jarfil@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Not confusion, evolution. If people keep using the floppy disk icon to mean “portable small amount of data”, the definition and icon for the same code point can easily get updated to reflect the generalized meaning and new media.

      Arguably, the specification should not be for a “floppy disk” or “minidisk” or “DVD” or specific kind of storage media in the first place, they should’ve been for “portable storage media” and let everyone draw what’s more fit for their demographic.

        • jarfil@beehaw.org
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          11 months ago

          Google’s hairy heart, because nobody read the spec and the artist just copied what they saw in the picture

          That isn’t what happened, and rather more of an example of what I was talking about.

          “Yellow heart” is a medical condition that makes the heart look “hairy”, “hairy heart” is referenced throughout history as associated with bravery and is still a saying in Portuguese; at the same time, “green heart” was represented as a sort of “sweaty” (envious) heart; “blue heart” was… a weird thing, but at least they made it blue color.

          Instead of “[color] heart”, someone designed them as “idiomatic meaning of [color heart]”, interpreting the Unicode descriptions as idiomatic expressions.

          This is the same process that could morph a “floppy disk” into a “small capacity portable data storage device” that could get depicted in any number of ways.

          Unicode isn’t designed to contain abstract concepts.

          I’d argue that all the emotion faces are “abstract concepts” 🌞😎🌝🕶️😇