Opera Browser Now Allows Emoji-only Web Addresses (theverge.com) 61
Web browser company Opera said Monday it will enable emoji-only based web addresses "to bring a new level of creativity to the internet." From a report: The integration is part of a partnership with Yat, a company that sells URLs with strings of emoji in them. "It's been almost 30 years since the world wide web launched to the public, and there hasn't been much innovation in the weblink space: people still include .com in their URLs," Jorgen Arnesen, executive vice president of mobile at Opera, said in a press release.
https://... (Score:2, Funny)
Welcome To The Club (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What for?
Seriously. Was it a joke purchase or does it have any actual purpose for you?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
How do you give out your email address? For example, if you were to give it to me, over a landline phone (OK, this is really retro, eh?), would you tell me it's, for example, "bigboss@beer-emoji.fm"? Will any beer emoji work, for example if I'm using an android or iphone? I'm curious, because I'm attracted to goofy things like this (sorry, it's goofy to me, because I haven't completely processed it yet). Thanks
Re: (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Case in point, what is the example in TFA ?
"Vulcan (Salute)" "Rocket/Space" "Web" "Look" ? Something to do with the Vulcan Centaur rocket ?
Re: (Score:2)
Case in point, what is the example in TFA ?
"Vulcan (Salute)" "Rocket/Space" "Web" "Look" ?
It's perfectly meaningful to those in the know. All hail the great beast, devourer of worlds!
Re: (Score:2)
but not everyone utilizes or sometimes even understands emojis.
Seems like a good way to filter those people out of your site if you are shooting for a particular demographic.
Re: Why? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Though I'd still argue it can date your website
I don't let any of my websites date other websites. I find it gets messy.
and make it harder for people to find.
Again, that could be desirable. I feel like it's a small set of niche cases but still, it would serve those cases well.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find this very useful. Use of emojis in a URL is conclusive proof that going to that web site is a waste of my time.
Dot poop (Score:2)
I might liquidate my 401k and invest everything domain squatting as many domains on the .poop TLDs as I can think of
Is there an emoji... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Eggplant poop, instead of eggplant peach.
How would you advertise it? (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Not to mention you see a string of seven emojis on a billboard. When you get home, can you accurately recall all of them? In the proper order? Was it a soccer ball or a tennis ball? A strawberry or a cranberry? Was the rocket before or after the sunflower ... or was that a daisy?
URLs are "for the olds" (Score:1)
I don't really think most people hand-enter URLs anymore, or even notice them. Search engines are their entry to the Web, and some browsers default to not even showing URLs in the address bar.
Why ask why (Score:2)
Was this necessary? was the same question posed to the scientist who invented decaf
Re: (Score:3)
Was this necessary? was the same question posed to the scientist who invented decaf
That scientist was later executed for crimes against humanity. (At least I hope they were.)
What have these guys been smoking ? (Score:2)
I can see that emojis are Unicode characters but why have them ? I suppose that they are not more meaningless to me than a URL in Chinese or other non Roman letters.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Various visions of the future tell us that the great unwashed will get by on computerised interfaces with nothing but icons, to the point most people will no longer need to read, and perhaps not even be able to.
Maybe this "emojii" thing will pave the way for that glorious future.
And yes, not merely you, or most users, but just about all developers dealing with unicode, know jack shit about most of the code points unicode offers. This is a bit of a flaw in the idea that unicode will be able to provide for
Hmm .com (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Hmm .com (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
This. The idiots have taken over the Internet. Well, for a long time, but we're losing the fight step by step.
I'm for migrating to Internet2.0 where everyone has a static IPv6 address and we dump the whole DNS crap and if you can't remember a simple 128 bits by heart, then you can go back to the baby zone.
We'd solve most of the scamming and phishing problems, all the DNS idiocity they introduced with their new (and almost unused TLDs), half of the issues with certificated and so on.
Re: (Score:2)
if you can't remember a simple 128 bits by heart
I call all ones!
"Hey, this website is SHIT!" (Score:2)
All kinds of problems with this (Score:5, Informative)
2. The emojis are not the same on all platforms and are different enough.
3. They are too small for the vast amount there is. I have seen cats, tigers, lions, all look like vague orange smudges. It wasnt until making the font size 40 or searching for it do I know what they are.
Re: (Score:2)
Not exactly. Windows and macOS have a built-in emoji picker dialog that makes it slightly easier to type them in -- Win+Period or Win+Semicolon on Windows, or Ctrl+Cmd+Space on macOS. (Newer Linux distros might too, I haven't checked.) But it's still a huge pain even with those, compared to typing something in native script.
Re: (Score:2)
1. It is impossible to type these in without memorizing the ALT code and/or needing a special app to have all of them.
Between the Android and iOS keyboards having a dedicated button, and in windows hitting Win+'.' bringing up the emoji interface I think 99% of all users on the internet do not need to memorise or use a special app.
The rest of your post is on point though and I agree the idea is stupid.
UTF-8 or nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
If it can't be typed in with a standard QWERTY keyboard then it shouldn't be an option. Too many ways already are out there to scam people. Adding emoji will just make it worse.
Re: (Score:3)
Emoji is part of UTF-8.
Re: (Score:1)
The 8 in UTF-8 is 8bit allowing only 256 characters.
The First of 32 characters are limited to mostly system commands like form feed, return, tab, beep the speaker, they are often reused to display mostly command symbols, Arrows, formatting options, and Card faces.
the Next set of of 96 characters, are mostly what we type on a standard keyboard.
The next 48 are for non-english letters and currencies.
48 after that are for box and block drawing.
The last set are Greek alphabet and advanced mathematical symbols.
T
Re: (Score:3)
You could've spent half the time it took writing this gibberish actually looking it up. UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 are all capable of representing the entire Unicode character set. The difference is that UTF-32 is fixed width, while UTF-8 and UTF-16 are variable width encodings. So an UTF-8 character can 1-4 bytes long. You seem to be describing some old MSDOS charset which has nothing to do with Unicode.
Re: (Score:3)
Agreed. GP is describing what sounds like Code Page 437.
Emoji are in Unicode which is a superset of UTF.
Um, no. Emoji are in Unicode. Unicode defines the correspondence of code points (32 bit numerical values) to glyphs (graphical representations of letters, symbols and more). UTF are various Unicode Transformation Formats that provide alternatives to storing 32 bits for each and every typed character. UTF-8 is an ingenious method that maps the ASCII and ANSI character sets to identical UTF-8 bytes while allowing the entire Unicode space to be repre
Re: (Score:3)
... while allowing the entire Unicode space to be represented.
With the exception of broken UTF-8 implementations like MySQL utf8mb3 that don't cover the Unicode planes that include emoji. But you'd be forgiven for not knowing that because MySQL was a super early adopter of UTF-8 before all of the Unicode spec had been finalized.
Microsoft was also an early adopter of Unicode but they went with UTF-16, which has its own problems and requires surrogate pairs in some cases to represent the entire space. For a while, at least fairly early on, the Microsoft Windows Unicod
Re: (Score:2)
Except domain names are limited to 7-bit ASCII - 8-bit values are not allowed. And UTF-8 encodings can fa
Re: (Score:2)
The 8 in UTF-8 is 8bit allowing only 256 characters.
The First of 32 characters are limited to mostly system commands like form feed, return, tab, beep the speaker, they are often reused to display mostly command symbols, Arrows, formatting options, and Card faces.
the Next set of of 96 characters, are mostly what we type on a standard keyboard.
The next 48 are for non-english letters and currencies.
48 after that are for box and block drawing.
The last set are Greek alphabet and advanced mathematical symbols.
The closest to UTF-8 Emoji is Char 1 and 2 which is smiling face, one hollow and one filled. But in what is standard used in emoji is doesn't map to the smile emoji.
Emoji are in Unicode which is a superset of UTF.
Surely you can't really not know what UTF-8 is by now?
Re: (Score:3)
The 8 in UTF-8 is 8bit allowing only 256 characters.
The First of 32 characters are limited to mostly system commands like form feed, return, tab, beep the speaker, they are often reused to display mostly command symbols, Arrows, formatting options, and Card faces.
the Next set of of 96 characters, are mostly what we type on a standard keyboard.
The first 7 bits of UTF-8 map to ASCII
The next 48 are for non-english letters and currencies.
48 after that are for box and block drawing.
The last set are Greek alphabet and advanced mathematical symbols.
The closest to UTF-8 Emoji is Char 1 and 2 which is smiling face, one hollow and one filled. But in what is standard used in emoji is doesn't map to the smile emoji.
Emoji are in Unicode which is a superset of UTF.
Nope, everything >= 128 in UTF means something else, they don't map to the extended ASCII stu
Re: (Score:2)
If it can't be typed in with a standard QWERTY keyboard then it shouldn't be an option.
Even more problematic: we won't be able to post emoji links on Slashdot!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If it can't be typed in with a standard QWERTY keyboard then it shouldn't be an option.
That's a very English-speaking bias. There are a lot of other languages in the world, many of which use characters not easily typed on a QWERTY keyboard, and more people don't speak English than do.
(But I agree that emoji URls are stupid.)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually more people speak English (at least one of the many dialects) than any other language. If you go strictly by native language you could say more people speak Mandarin Chinese but if you include second languages then more people speak English. It would be kind of silly to only consider first languages though since even if it is your second language you would still be able to speak English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Since the number of people that speak English is ~1.34 billion you would be righ
Re: (Score:2)
The point remains: a good many people - billions - using languages whose written form includes characters not easily typed in a QWERTY keyboard, and "If it can't be typed in with a standard QWERTY keyboard then it shouldn't be an option" is just bigoted.
Re: (Score:2)
The QWERTY keyboard is effective for more languages than just English. It may involve adding additional special key combinations for special language specific characters but there are dozens (hundreds?) of languages that use a qwerty keyboard as a computer input device.
That being said, I don't disagree with your main argument.
Re: (Score:2)
See how easy it works!
brings a new level of creativity to the Internet (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Best (Score:2)
This is the best reason I've seen to not support Opera at all.
So on slashdot every url is now going to look: (Score:5, Funny)
-Stop the insanity!
And now a feature no one asked for (Score:1)
Marketing People (Score:5, Insightful)
Since we can't simply execute all the marketing people (who are the ones who come up with this constant stream of stupid ideas), can we maybe figure out a way to keep them off the Internet? It would solve so many problems (starting with spam).
Of course peopl include .com in URL (Score:2)
People only include .com in URL if the registered domain is a .com domain. There are hundreds of TLDs now so if you don't include the .com how is you browser supposed to know if you want to go to here.com or here.org or here.gov or any of the myriad other variations that are available?
That is like complaining that people will still be including the smiley face emoji at the end of their emoji URLs.
Those who fail to read history... (Score:2)