Hearts in address bar? - html

I've seen here when I click on the file hearts.rb that my address bar contains those hearts even on my phone.
How does this work ? Where to find escaping codes like this one ?

Unicode?
❤ ♥ ♡
https://www.google.com/?q=%E2%9D%A4%20%E2%99%A5%20%E2%99%A1
Actually, after a little searching, the ones in that file name are 0x01f499 through 0x01f49C, which are part of the Emoji Unified codeset, which is supported in iOS. Not all fonts or browsers support this unicode range.

Related

How does each platform display their own versions of emojis?

If you take a bit of text that contains emojis from whatsapp web, and paste it into facebook messenger, you'll get different versions on each platform. How does each platform use their own images as placeholders for emojis? Please note that the emoji code is preserved when copy-pasted. So a melon on one platform will still be a melon on the other platform.
I'm not even sure this is a programming question, if not I'd be very grateful if you could point me to the right direction :)
Emoji are represented as unicode characters that individual platforms and apps can interpret as they see fit. While most modern platforms will automatically translate the unicode character into the appropriate image, some apps will override this behavior and replace the platform-standard unicode character with their own image.
text.replace("{unicodeEmojiString}", "{eitherAMarkerOrImageSpecificToMyApp}"

What HTML entity to use in the email subject line for a heart?

This question may sound like stupid but I tried all possible HTML entities and the subject line for the email I send is still not showing the heart on Apple devices (iPhone, iPad, etc).
It may be just the software I use for testing (MaxBulk Mailer, ExactTarget).
I also tried different charset (UTF-8, ascii, etc).
Does anybody know how to make a heart appear as a heart into the subject line of an email for Apple devices?
The subject line is part of the email headers. The email headers may only contain ASCII characters. The subject line is not being interpreted as HTML or anything else, it's plain text. You need to embed the character as Unicode character, but you cannot do this since the headers must be in ASCII. To embed any non-ASCII characters in a header, you need to use a MIME Encoded-Word.
See mb_encode_mimeheader, read its examples.
The resulting header will need to look something like this:
Subject: =?utf-8?B?4p2k?=
Which decodes to this in the mail client:
❤
With regards to your question here: you may have picked the wrong heart. Try ♥ instead of ❤. The first one should render on a BlackBerry (and Android 2.2), too, as this test shows. The latter one, however, doesn't.

What are these fancy icons in HTML called?

I see some websites use fancy icons. An example is this curly leaf icon at Dive Into HTML5:
❧
I would like to know the formal name of these icons. I've tried searching "html entities" and "html glyphs" in Google but the results always show the boring old arrows and Greek characters.
This is a unicode character.
If you are using UTF-8 encoding - which the example site is - you have a very large range of characters you can use - not just arrows and greek characters.
I'd encourage you to use Firebug or some other developer inspector in your browser. It makes it very easy to reverse engineer things like this.
These don't have any particular name as far as I know, they are simply Unicode glyphs. Here is a table.

Embedding and Displaying chinese/japanese

I have been working on a subtitles engine for flash/flv video player. On my Mac everything is great, nice aliased glyphs, displaying all the characters, etc. Switch to windows, it all goes out the window. Some machines with Eastern Characters enabled display fine, but I can't guarantee all users will have this option selected.
I am using the TLFTextField, I am pulling in UTF-8 XML with Chinese/Japanese characters.
I have tried embedding the (required fonts/glyphs) but pushes the file size up massively.
I have also tried changing it to unicode, with no joy. Has anyone got any experience with displaying these characters while maintaining a low file size.
I'm not really offering a solution to your question, but if the user is wanting Chinese or Japanese subtitles, I'm pretty sure that they will have the correct encoding.

Which of the following Unicode characters should be used in HTML?

I am aware that any Unicode character can be inserted into an HTML document via the following format:

...where 0000 is the character code of the desired character
My question is: which of these characters has the most widespread availability when it comes to the client's browser being able to display the character?
In other words, what are the ranges of codes that should be used in an HTML document that is going to be widely deployed?
Whether you enter them via &#xNNNN; character reference or just by typing or copy-pasting them directly into the page, it's purely a question of fonts. If the user has a glyph for the character in the fonts their web browser knows about, it'll work. If they don't, it'll be a little box.
fileformat.info have font-availability details that can be of help for guessing how widespread glyph support is. eg. hit the Fonts link on this page for U+25B6. For me, this renders on most platforms but not on a vanilla XP install with IE6 (IE7 picks it up from Lucida Sans Unicode which IE6 FSR doesn't bother look at).
◄ ► U+25C4, U+25BA Left/Right-Pointing Pointer glyphs seem to be more widely available than
◀ ▶ U+25C0, U+25B6 Left/Right-Pointing Triangle glyphs
so I'd use those instead. In particlar they render in XP+IE6 with default fonts because they are present in Arial. Which renders them more like Triangle than Pointer is supposed to be. (sigh) OTOH its up/down Triangles are fine.
SO uses ► for list bullets in the ‘how to format’ box over there. ⇗
[response to comment in edit instead of comment as site JS appears to be playing up]
There's also ‣, U+2023 Triangular Bullet, which is in a block of widely-available typographical-niceties. Unfortunately, again, it's not in Arial or other fonts IE6 on a default XP will use. Neither is ▸ U+25B8 Black Right-Pointing Small Triangle.
French-style quotes (guillemets) ‹ › « » will be available absolutely everywhere, but using them for arrows might be considered a bit of an abuse.