Difference between revisions of "1953: The History of Unicode"

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{{comic
 
| number    = 1953
 
| date      = February 9, 2018
 
| title    = The History of Unicode
 
| image    = the_history_of_unicode.png
 
| titletext = 2048: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️"
 
}}
 
 
==Explanation==
 
{{incomplete|Created by a BOT - Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon.}}
 
 
 
{{comic
 
{{comic
 
| number    = 1953
 
| number    = 1953

Revision as of 16:49, 9 February 2018

The History of Unicode
2048: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️"
Title text: 2048: "Great news for Maine—we're once again an independent state!!! Thanks, @unicode, for ruling in our favor and sending troops to end New Hampshire's annexation. 🙏🚁🎖️"

Explanation

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Transcript

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Discussion

Is it me or my laptop isn't rendering the Unicode in the title text well? My laptop uses UTF-8. Boeing-787lover 16:55, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Don't know about you, but for me the comic is currently just a massively-blown-up picture of the top left corner of the one displayed on this page. 141.101.107.204 18:06, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
I'm experiencing the same top-left-corner zoom in chrome and firefox on a mac. 162.158.63.88 18:11, 9 February 2018 (UTC)Sean P. O. MacCath-Moran
Same here. Safari 11.0.3 on Mac. 172.68.211.82 18:13, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
It would appear that the image itself is a massively zoomed-in version. vor0nwe (talk) 18:17, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
If anyone is wondering, this is how the comic looked like for a while: http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/File:history_of_unicode_zoom.png
It is fixed now, and so are the years in the last panel. -Asdf (talk) 18:57, 9 February 2018 (UTC)
Not just you, in the title text I only see the first two emojis, I had to read the explanation to discover what the other two are, LOL! Then again, I'm on an iPad 1, I've come to expect such things. :) NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:40, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

Strictly speaking Unicode [nowadays] is not an encoding; UTF-8 and UTF-16 are (possible encodings of Unicode) --JakubNarebski (talk) 20:28, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Might just be me, but I think the last comment from Cueball might also refer to the senator thanking the Unicode committee for recognizing the impact Lobsters have on Maine? Unicode was just supposed to make it easier to talk across different devices, and not have a role in legitimizing certain industries? 172.68.174.46 22:43, 9 February 2018 (UTC)

Another issue that Unicode solves, perhaps more important than having single common encoding for characters (which we don't have; UTF-8 is the most popular, but UTF-16/USC-2 is also used), is the ability to write multilingual texts. --JakubNarebski (talk) 09:57, 10 February 2018 (UTC)

Recent revision lost the explanation of twitter post signature --JakubNarebski (talk) 10:21, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

I'm taking issue with the statement "Neither dispute ever quite rose to the level of a full-on shooting war but they got surprisingly close." I read the full text at the provided link, and they got close to a shooting incident between fishermen on one boat and law enforcement officers. That was the full extent of any potential shooting, and that is nowhere close to a full-on shooting war as I see it! I think this point could be a little less melodramatic. If nobody raises an objection or modifies the text accordingly, I will eventually clean it up myself. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 14:16, 11 February 2018 (UTC)👍

I'd still consider that surprisingly close, in context. --162.158.58.87 20:30, 12 February 2018 (UTC)
Agreed, I didn't read the article, but even from your summation I'd say "surprisingly close" is effective description. NiceGuy1 (talk) 06:40, 13 February 2018 (UTC)
Ok, I'll let it stand then. Ianrbibtitlht (talk) 12:29, 13 February 2018 (UTC)

"Prior to Unicode, Unicode attempts to Unicode [...]" dafuq? I would change it by myself but I don't even understand what that's supposed to express. Elektrizikekswerk (talk) 09:18, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Perhaps the conflict referred to in the title text was conducted entirely by emoji, and the Unicode Consortium sent several new 'Troop' emojis to intervene. 162.158.155.26 10:40, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Emotional are just evil. It was a sad, sad day when they were first allowed into Uncoded. If you can draw it with a biro, pencil, quill pen, stick of charcoal, one of those brushes that used to be used for Chinese or any other writing stick that's fine. Everyone's script goes in. But emoji are not anyone's script, they are an invention of phone manufacturers, designed for viewing on a phone rather than writing. So they can be coloured in rather than line drawing, leading to allegations of racism because the smiley glyph on the reader's phone is brown, or is not brown, or there is no smiley with a hijab (which could be worked around if we were still allowed to use punctuation and imagination for emoticons) 162.158.38.58 12:57, 23 February 2020 (UTC)


Initial version of the comic has "1998" in panel 3 instead of "1988" as shown in panel 1.