I discourage replacing (-: or (: by things. <snip>By using (-: and :-) you assume there will be exactly 2 sets, and never more.
The proposal's more like a second set of special cases, in the same way that many of the existing Lemmings smileys are already special cases not conforming to :
keyword: or :
group-keyword:
That said, maybe the argument is that the benefits of using (-
: over :
lix-smile: are unclear/weak at best. I expect (though admittedly without hard data) that most people will see the smileys in their graphic form, and insert them most of the time by clicking on their graphics. Thus the encodings are irrelevant most of the time except in the case of accidental instances (a point Simon raised, which I've tried to address by being mindful of it, hence the proposal of o-
: instead of o
: for example). For the minority cases where the smileys will be displayed without graphics (eg. proposed "lite" theme or the user profile setting to turn off smileys), or where the user chooses to type out the encoding manually, there are some pros and cons between (-
: vs :
lix-smile:, none of which particularly stands out to me (but mostly because I simply don't fall into the minority cases with my usage patterns).
Anyway, so one vote for (Proxima) and one vote against (Simon) so far.
I'd like this proposal settled before I started adding the Lix smileys.
(What character is the backwards D?)
I just randomly perused in the Character Map application on Windows, and ran into U+2C6D "Latin Capital Letter Alpha" which looks very close to a backwards D. For all I know the Unicode standard might actually have a true "backwards D" somewhere. To be honest, I'm slightly wary of introducing non-ASCII characters into the encodings (for one thing, it defeats the purpose of being able to easily type out by hand). I was inspired to do so mainly because of D
:, but in hindsight I should probably go with (|
: instead.
The original issue for this thread is still there, smileys for different expressions are too similar.
Hmm, so how do you see it play out in my compromise proposal where all three variants of :
o are available? Is it important that any existing posts using :
o be changed to a new smiley graphic, or is it okay to leave that encoding unchanged as long as the proposed improved variants are available for use under other encodings? Or is a compromise already not acceptable on the grounds of
still being in existence?
[edit: or did I misread, and you mean that the proposed Lix set still has too many similar-looking expressions?]