The more interesting thing is why basically no one uses Eastern ideograms in the West, except maybe the Korean ideogram for crying (ㅠㅠ) and rarely, other kaomoji-like stuff. Some kanji also tell visual stories, and most children learn them just fine, so it’s not as simple as accessibility. Borrowing kanji was also anticipated by many sci fi writers and yet is not to be.
I will bite, wtf has Chrome to do with UTF-8? As far as I can find the last browser to struggle with it was IE5, IE6 was released almost a decade before Chrome was a thing.
There is no requirement whatsoever that the browser actually use 16-bit code units to represent strings. This is what Simon Sapin achieved for Servo with the WTF-8 encoding, which extends UTF-8 to allow surrogates, including unmatched surrogates: it makes it able to represent these strings with 8-bit code units, commonly halving memory usage and improving the speed of various sorts of linear processing (though at the cost of random access speed which becomes O(n)).
Some programming languages also start adopting them, too. Raku is the one I know (it allows French and German quotes, too). Maybe Julia, too? I think some language communities tend to be more open to widespread Unicode usage in source code than others.
Once upon a time, I wanted to rely on these distinctions in a TTS frontend to distinguish between 5" floppy disk and "Mambo No. 5"
I soon realized that people use quotation marks and dashes in such a random manner that insisting on treating the semantics literally would create more confusion than it would resolve.
Edit: Now that my comment has posted, I realized you used the correct characters, but the font on my browser rendered them in a seemingly incorrect way, so they looked like double primes.
https://jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotation-marks-in-european-l...
I like to call «this» the Swiss system, because in Switzerland they use it for four different official languages.
That would really be handy on the CLI instead of doing a bunch of escaping with backslashes.
I've had to run double-depth for loops which then execute an awk script remotely. Three would have been fine.
The character I can think of that kind of matches the description is 囧, which is a Chinese character.
Yu. Having two of them looks like a crying face. Although tha (ಥ) is also a common component of crying face (ಥ_ಥ). They're talking about kaomoji which use various non-latin or fullwidth symbols (though you're right that they're largely not ideograms) to compose pretty extensive "smileys" e.g. the look of disapproval uses kannada, denko uses greek and katakana, ...
The Gboard keyboard on android has a tab for many of these common “emoticon” faces / character sequences. If you open the emoji picker on the keyboard and then tap the far right bottom tab icon “:-)”
They can get very elaborate though, these are just very basic common faces.
iOS also has that on the standard Japanese "Kana" keyboard (and possibly others), under the "^_^" key.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't know!
(Yeah - I know - it's not an ideogram)
That’s false. There is a lot of students of CJK languages in European universities as Japanese and more recently Korean as popular language. Chinese and Japanese can be learn in some high-school too. There are publishers publishing books containing such characters (e.g. You Feng in Paris). And of course the diaspora and heritage learners... That a lot of people, even more in countries with significant East-Asian population like Australia or the US.
As far as I know this only works for characters in the BMP, but for such characters it may be faster than picking them from that cmd-ctrl-space popup.
If you don't have that input source available, you can add it via the "Input Sources" tab of Keyboard preferences. There you can also enable showing the input menu in the menu bar giving you an easy way to switch between "Unicode Hex Input" and your normal input source.