The only comment I can think of follows:
Good job on having the picture a png instead of a jpg. Trust me, it’s something to be proud of.
I guess his — key is broken.
I don’t care for “” versus “” , or — versus --. Mainly because they have to be escaped in XML whereas the simple ASCII equivalents don’t. Yet another thing I don’t want to think about… and I’m not a stickler for perfect aesthetics aka designer. I use Windows, and I’ve never installed Photoshop 
It’s funny because there’s obviously no need for some of us to write in kanji. 
Speaking of the Byte Order Mark, I wonder how a “Unicode is the BOM” bumper sticker would go over.
I don’t care
Way to go, Jeff!
Jeff, I don’t really know about XML, but in HTML you don’t have to escape all the typographical characters. I guess in XML you needn’t either. Just install a SmartyPants plugin for Movable Type and you are ready to go.
I don’t care for “” versus “” , or — versus –
This is the “aesthetics designer” equivalent of a tall pile of “elsifs.”
Yes, it gets the job done and we know what you mean but they betoken either ignorance or a lack of craftsmanship. When your copyeditor or graphics designer bitches about cleaning up em dashes, s/he isn’t just being a prissy fussbucket — they’re displaying “craftsmanship,” a personal quality I’ve noticed some programmers hold in high regard.
When your copyeditor or graphics designer bitches about cleaning up em dashes
Go team!
Many programmers’ English skills seem to deteriorate in direct proportion to their programming skills. This is sad.
-fred
I just designed and ordered a shirt with “I #x2764 Unicode” on it.
Thanks for the inspiration: http://bka-bonn.de/wordpress/?p=73
The “Mac” version is also what you see in Firefox under Linux, when a page has broken character-coding.
The bumperstickers are a little large for my taste, but if these were done in, say, 2"x0.6" or similar size, they’d be perfect for adorning laptop lids (like the Coding Horror sticker I currently have there)…
In which encoding scheme is the heart glyph encoded as a single byte?
What happen? Somebody set up us the BOM. All your Unicode are belong to us.
The annoying practice of using backticks and footmarks for quotation marks was due to IBM’s decision to make the backtick and apostrophe look like the real single quote marks.
Your title shouldn’t be “I #9829; Unicode” or “I ? Unicode” but rather “I #65533; Unicode” – which is the UTF-8 encoded string displayed in an ISO-8859-1 context.
Jens: Well, for starters, there’s the interpretation of extended ASCII that the old IBM-PC DOS computers used, which IIRC stuck it in somewhere in one of the first 32 characters that weren’t actually used as control characters.
(After checking: Yup, it’s at 0x03, with the other card suits in 0x04, 0x05, and 0x06. See, for instance, http://www.jimprice.com/jim-asc.shtml.)
I would also hope that Microsoft can stop confusing its misuse of “Unicode” terminology in apps and documentation as UTF-16. Try saving from Notepad as “Unicode” format and you get double-byte UTF-16 text files. Any reference to “Unicode text” in MSDN Library really means UTF-16 or perhaps some variation.
The rest of the world knows UTF-8 is unicode, too. MS just prefers UTF-16 for what it considers most efficient when handling what could be any language in the world.
Well, using Unicode is fine, but you can still get that glyph if the font being used for display doesn’t have that symbol defined. I had this very problem recently in Outlook. The customer had a plugin that, after it had done some processing, they wanted to prefix the subject line with a unicode character. However, some users had configured their outlook to use different fonts - and of course, not all these fonts defined the character they wanted to prefix the subject line with…
“I don’t care for “” versus “” , or — versus --. Mainly because they have to be escaped in XML whereas the simple ASCII equivalents don’t.”
Where did you get that idea? Sure, you can type these things as escaped HTML entities but you can also simply enter the characters directly (via Character Map or Alt+Num sequences). If your HTML file has charset=utf-8 (as it should) then the literal characters will display just fine.
I guess his — key is broken.
I don’t care for “” versus “” , or — versus --. Mainly because they
have to be escaped in XML whereas the simple ASCII equivalents don’t.
Whut? I’ve used UTF-8 encoding and —, “, ”, and even characters which don’t have a HTML escape code, like “circle of commas” (http://tipotheday.com/2007/08/26/wtf-is-this-character/) in XML, XSLT and XHTML without problems. Just save and serve the thing with the right encoding.
Lol, Unicode.
disclamer
I am not a programmer, I wrote some thousand conceptually-flawed lines in C, some thousand lines in perl I cannot understand anymore (I did not need comments at that time) and two SQL apps, the first one being a journey to discovering that databases are intended to be indexed and not just a long list of rows
/disclamer
I also loosly run a personal blog, powered by mysql. Which I upgraded from version 3.x to 4.x (or something like that).
And the world ended that day…
I ended up with a complete mess in my non-English version, with questions marks, double questions marks, squares and other things I cannot name. I did not even know that there are alphabets with three dots over an ‘a’!
Oh man - how I hated the [censored] [censored] who introduced the UTF versus ASCII vsersus god-knows-what-but-i-dont-give-a-you-know-what-anyway. I just wanted to upgrade my mysql and ended up in the middle of a Discovery Channel series called “the mysteries of encoding” – the original was in Korean, dubbed to Swahili and then translated by a ethnology graduate.
This is just to say that while such things are probably exciting for real programmers (or are not, dunno), the typical [insert you favourite Windows or Linux or Mac or WARP or VMS system] dummies which I am part of should never notice.
I spent nights on that nightmare (finally going native UTF) browsing though literraly hundred of sites loaded with cries from people with the same problem.
This said, I should have probably read the upgrade notes before going ahead.