And yet HN won't let me use them
I'm not really too sure why. I don't mind them in personal messages or texts and stuff, but seeing them on public pages just kind of annoys me for some reason.
I see it on public repositories sometimes, but it never really seems to add anything useful.
I'm used to them at this point, and it's kind of nice when scanning commits to be able to see what type they are.
Don't get me wrong, i'm not going to get mad or lose my mind or anything when I see an emoji somewhere, it just I dunno it looks wrong or something.
I'm not because it's completely arbitrary about it e.g. you can include 🁓, 🀕, ⏱, 🃅, box drawing, or Z̸̠̽a̷͍̟̱͔͛͘̚ĺ̸͎̌̄̌g̷͓͈̗̓͌̏̉o̴̢̺̹̕ but not trigrams, die faces, box elements, musical notes or flags. They just whitelisted/blacklisted entire blocks and called it a day.
Which obviously is par for the course when it comes to HN's comment box, the markup system is even more half-assed.
(The SI standard for separating the integer part from the fractional part is to use "." or ",", whichever is customary in your location. Using thin space for grouping removes the ambiguity that you get in places that use one of "."/"," for grouping and the other for a decimal point).
Let's see what it does with `U+00BC Vulgar Fraction One Quarter Unicode Character`... ¼
Nope it allows it instead of turning into `1/4`, so that's not canonical normalization. I guess it's custom rules? Or some other unicode transformation we're not thinking of, or other third-party re-usable transformation.
They just blacklisted (or whitelisted) blocks or categories.
Country flags seem like they could be used for political trolling.
Die faces could lead to weird rolling threads or other things.
Musical notes, you got me, can't really think of anything too bad for those.
The markup's not great, but too much formatting is distracting. I personally prefer the limited options. You focus more on the content of your comment than making it look pretty.
The only thing i really despise about hn's formatting is the code blocks or whatever they are, the one on mobile that vanishes off the side and you have to scroll horizontally to read everything. I really can't stand when people use those for quotes.
Other than that though, hn's formatting makes everything uniform and fairly easy to read through. There's no fancy nonsense getting in the way of things.
Actually, that's part of why those code block things piss me off, they're probably the fanciest piece of formatting you can do and all it does is obstruct information and make me waste time while reading.
That’s not really believable given how arbitrary it is.
> Die faces could lead to weird rolling threads or other things.
As if tiles or playing cards could not be used that way.
> The markup's not great, but too much formatting is distracting.
The problem is that despite having only two directives half of HN’s markup is actively detrimental: because there is no escaping, no inline literals, and the parsing is sub-par, in my experience the “emphasis” directive causes issues more often than it helps. HN’s markup would be significantly improved by removing it entirely.
> I really can't stand when people use those for quotes
Which would be way less likely if HN actually supported quotes.
>Which would be way less likely if HN actually supported quotes.
But look how well this works ;p.
Sorry...couldn't resist.
I dunno, I like the 'hackish' nature of it.
You're right i'm sure the tiles or playing cards could be used like that too, it may be arbitrary, I don't know. But, those were just some reasons off the top of my head, i'm sure when HN was being programmed a bit more thought went into it, or maybe not, who knows?
My main point is, I like the simplicity of it all, sure it could be better, but better doesn't necessarily lead to better quality content.
There's a minimum amount of distractions, most users find reasonable ways to communicate the context of the content of their posts and scrolling through most threads tends to be a mostly uniform experience where if users are following a few established conventions, you can follow the flow of things pretty well.
It's not perfect, it's not the best, but I feel like it fits the general vibe and nature of the site. It gives HN an identity among all the other news aggregators and forums.
No, that's exactly what they did. I asked.
Let's see if they work here:
Edit: No, they were filtered out.