Curiously, the iPhone and iPod touch are missing the ↩ glyph1. I’m sure it’s missing because Apple never thought anyone would use it, but it’s being used as a footnote return character by John Gruber, Allen Pike and mx, among thousands2 more.
Apple does respond to feedback, so it’s worth asking. If you’ve got an iPod touch, file feedback here. If you’ve got an iPhone, the feedback site is here.
October 19th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Also the , and a number of other ones.
October 19th, 2007 at 4:47 pm
Hmm, I just checked (using your comment). The logo is rendering on my iPod touch with the latest firmware. Was it missing in the first release of the iPhone?
October 19th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
I have a touch as well, and I can see it in the comments as well.
However, I renamed some simple URL-launching apps to have a at the beginning of the name and the Touch screen just showed a question mark in its place. Things like ° and • work, but not a whole lot else.
My firmware is also the latest, 1.1.1. I don’t have an iPhone.
Why would the system and the browser have varying degrees of character support?
October 19th, 2007 at 9:22 pm
Safari/WebKit will switch fonts to get a glyph it needs. The launcher won’t.
October 20th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
I use the familiar triangle characters for an outliner I wrote in Javascript, and I did file a bug with Apple that some, but not all of these, exist on the iPhone: (Let’s see if this web comment feature can handle unicode!)
white right pointing triangle: ▷ \u25B7 (present on iPhone)
black right pointing triangle: ► \u25BA (absent on iPhone)
white down pointing triangle: ▽ \u25BD (present on iPhone)
black down pointing triangle: ▼ \u25BC
I like to use characters rather than images, where possible, because the characters will scale smoothly with the font size.
October 20th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I have to admit, WordPress stands up to unicode better than I expected. I remember a few years ago, the situation was a lot worse. I was never surprised to see encodings broken. Now it’s really unexpected to see something modern not handle it with grace!
I’ve barely begun exploring the unicode character set. I’ve been in a bit of a web development coma for the last few years and am only now starting to come out of it. First my blog, tomorrow the world!