Andrew West writes about Unicode, historical scripts, and writing systems, including long s rules, Tibetan numerals, and new Unicode releases.
HN commenters link it as an authoritative, detailed source on Unicode proposals, the long s, and unusual characters like Tibetan half digits.
IE8+Vista is still the only combination which can display traditional Mongolian script web pages properly. (Granted this is rather more obscure than Korean, but it's still useful to about 5 million people + every Qing dynasty historian.) All the others:
1. don't implement/misimplement joining/shaping behaviour
2. don't support vertical left-to-right layout
Though to be fair, for the better part of a decade MonTex was the only solution for anyone who wanted to write a document in Mongolian/Manchu/Dagur/etc.
http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2008/10/vertical-layout-in-ie8.html
I don't believe that Swastika symbol is as ancient as these. Wikipedia tells me that it appears for the first time in 3000 BCE in India.
Also, regarding "German Laws and general sentiment", I invite you to read this detailed blog post[1] on the history of Svasti symbols in Unicode[2] and the controversies around getting them in Unicode.
Edit: Typo. Links corrected.
[1]: https://babelstone.blogspot.com/2006/02/when-is-swastika-not-swastika.html
[2]: https://unicode.org/cldr/utility/list-unicodeset.jsp?a=%5B%3Aname%3D%2FSVASTI%2F%3A%5D&g=&i=
> Flags for England, Scotland and Wales are part of Emoji 5.0 and not shown here as they don't require new code points.
Apparently Unicode Inc. isn't concerned with flag emoji at all. This 'Emoji 5.0' is a completely independent standard.
Personally, I prefer reading about Unicode updates from http://babelstone.blogspot.com/ ; it doesn't mix up details like those, and covers additions beyond sensationalist fluff like emoji.
This page has links to the proposals to add characters:
http://babelstone.blogspot.com/2013/10/whats-new-in-unicode-70.html
Including this one with comments on the Wingdings addition.
http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n4239.pdf
a) Ireland recommends adding the following new characters to this table:
1F597 REVERSED HAND WITH MIDDLE FINGER EXTENDED
1F598 RAISED HAND WITH PART BETWEEN MIDDLE AND RING FINGERS
More fun facts:
- We went from 128 ASCII characters to 110,187 currently-assigned Unicode characters (or Encoded Character code points, to use precise language)[1]. That's a thousand-fold increase. Who would have thought we'd need so many!
- Unicode can represent 1,114,112 code points. So there's lots of room for yet more.
[1] http://babelstone.blogspot.ca/2005/11/how-many-unicode-characters-are-there.html
This reminds me of the only Unicode character (as of 10.0) which numeral value is negative: U+0F33 TIBETAN DIGIT HALF ZERO has a value of -1/2. Andrew West has written an interesting article [1] about this and other "half" Tibetan numerals.
[1] https://babelstone.blogspot.com/2007/04/numbers-that-dont-add-up-tibetan-half.html