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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

Those corners look like Unicode block chars.

I believe here ASCII was used not as in ASCII-the-standard but as “ASCII” in ASCII-art. I also believe that ASCII art should actually be called “monospaced Unicode text” since people doing ASCII art have been using as many codepoints as were available in their platform of choice.

Yeah, "BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT UP AND LEFT" and "BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT DOWN AND LEFT". (If this were ASCII, it would have used | ("VERTICAL LINE") instead of "BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT VERTICAL".)

ASCII means more than just characters from the ASCII character standard today, for better or worse. The "modern" translation would be something like "text".

I don't agree or disagree with it, so don't argue with me, just trying to explain how people use it today.

Anyone can write that a word no longer has its defined meaning. That can’t even be refuted, as it’s certain someone is confused somewhere.

However, ASCII is not a random ancient word, it’s a ratified standard. Would be like calling any datetime format “ISO8601”.

Context is important, ya know? If we're talking about text encodings, that's one thing, but we're talking about drawing. "ASCII text" drawing was never entirely limited to ASCII even in the days of single-byte encodings. There were code pages which used the high bit for more useful drawing glyphs, people took advantage of that when they could.

The concept of an extended ASCII encoding goes way back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_ASCII, and UTF-8 is just another extended ASCII encoding, albeit a very clever one, with a lot of codepoints.

Extended supersets of a thing are not the thing, they are a larger group.

See synecdoche: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche

Neither a superset or subset of a thing is the thing. Only the thing is the thing.

But when you combine units of language the result is not just the sum of the parts. word1 means X and word2 means Y but established phrase "word1 word2" rarely means X + Y. The result relates to X and Y but it has a life of its own that depends on how it's used.

Think of these and how they are more than sum of their parts. Demo scene. Serverless. Skyscraper. Information security. Artificial intelligence. Drawing board.

Are you saying we should reserve the term "ASCII art" literally for text containing just the original 95 printable characters? Even if you can make a good argument for that, I fear you're fighting a losing battle.

Yes, the terms ANSI art and Unicode art have been around for decades and are defined standards as well. No need to make an argument.

> However, ASCII is not a random ancient word, it’s a ratified standard

Even so, ask around and you'll find debates about which ASCII standard is the "right" and "true" one. Some argue only the initial standard is correct for ASCII art, you need to follow that, others say any of the versions are alright.

It's still ambiguous.

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