Taking the child on a tour through punctuation, Mr. Stops introduces him to a cast of literal “characters”: there is Counsellor Comma, who knows “neither guile nor repentance” in his pursuit of “dividing short parts of a sentence”; Ensign Semicolon struts with militaristic pride, for “into two or more parts he’ll a sentence divide”; and The Exclamation Point is “struck with admiration”, his face “so long, and thin and pale”.
On the detail and world-building in 40 years of William Gibson’s work.
Be liberal in what you accept:
Basically, if your form can’t register Beyoncé – it has failed.
For all your copying and pasting needs:
A delightful reference for HTML Symbols, Entities and ASCII Character Codes
What a lovely timeline of civilisation. This site makes for a nice companion piece to that database of dimensioned drawings—they’re both delightful to explore.
When is a space not a space?
Tom talks about ogham stones and unicode.
Every single font-feature-settings value demonstrated in one single page.
I’ve been wondering about this for quite a while: surely demanding specific patterns in a password (e.g. can’t be all lowercase, must include at least one number, etc.) makes it easier to crack them, right? I mean, you’re basically providing a ruleset for brute-forcing.
Turns out, yes. That’s exactly right.
When employees are faced with this requirement, they tend to:
- Choose a dictionary word or a name
- Make the first character uppercase
- Add a number at the end, and/or an exclamation point
If we know that is a common pattern, then we know where to start…
The (literally) hidden dangers of copying code snippets from the web and pasting them into the command line.
This cautionary tale backs up a small tip I heard for getting to understand how found code works: deliberately type it out instead of copying and pasting.
Glenn Fleishman on the war of attrition between primes and quotation marks on the web.
Google’s Noto (short for no-tofu; tofu being the rectangle of unicode sadness) is certainly ambitious. It has glyphs from pretty much every known alphabet …including Ogham and Linear B!
The numero sign, the reversed question mark, the interrobang, the l b bar symbol, the Tironian et, the capitulum, and the ironieteken.
Some excellent research for web developers: find out which unicode characters have the widest support—release useful for choosing icons.
Jessica’s handy guide to writing the right quotes and accents on a Mac keyboard.
The secret life of punctuation.
Kanji characters that transform into the animal they represent.
A handy page for looking up HTML entities.
Stuart posts a really handy string for testing internationalisation: Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn