Ars Technica would have you believe that the lack of facing pages in “e-book” gadgets like Amazon’s Kindle is the missing killer feature.
The solution to this problem is obvious and straightforward: design all e-book readers to display pairs of pages in the traditional, facing-page format in which books were designed to be read.
PottyMouth, my tool for transforming completely unstructured and untrusted text to valid, nice-looking, completely safe xHTML, is finally ready for its 1.0 release. I’ve added implicit list support, which was the last feature I wanted to hold up 1.0 for. Read about what PottyMouth is and what it does here. And if you know someone who’s building a website that might need it, tell them about it.
Now you too can construct meaning out of color directly and unambiguously. If only we could come up with a font to convey the news fairly and balancedly.
I’ve just released PottyMouth, a tool for transforming completely unstructured and untrusted text to valid, nice-looking, safe HTML. Check it out.
Why isn’t the play/pause/stop/record family of icons in Unicode? It includes the four suits on modern playing cards, every mathematical symbol ever used, and a number of now obsolete languages. Shouldn’t it also include what is a ubiquitous set of about eight icons used on everything from 8-tracks to iPods? There’s even a nice spot for them, right next to ⏏ (eject).
This has been discussed at least twice on the unicode mailing list, but no decision was reached either time. It seems that some people think the icons should be included because they would be useful, and others think they should be excluded because it would open the door to including every pictogram and icon in use on every toolbar and consumer electronic in existence. The latter seems like a very flimsy argument to me; the argument for including them stems from their ubiquity, which would prevent every other symbol in use from piggybacking their way into the character set. In fact, the only symbol more ubiquitous is probably the “power” symbol; it should also be included. And most of the symbols already included in the “Miscellaneous Technical” chart are far more obscure.
Update 2007-05-10: The unicode people graciously responded to my email regarding this, and it sounds like it would require an evangelist to encourage the inclusion of these symbols before it happened. It’s so awesome when a standards organization actually responds to the needs of its users.
I’m very excited that Glagolitic, an ancient script used to write Slavic languages in south-eastern Europe, has been incorporated into Unicode. I photographed Glagolitic in the cathedral in Zagreb, Croatia.
