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Our office recently updated to a new version of the Office Suite, and it still has an icon in the upper-left corner to perform the 'Save' function. Floppy drives have not been in use for years, and many children would not recognize a 3.5 inch floppy disk on sight. Programs have used this icon for years, because we have yet to find a suitable replacement. The CD/DVD can no longer represent saving, because they have come and gone. Even moving to the more abstract Piggy Bank icon would not work, because they are seldom used in the modern age. A USB Key icon may represent saving in some form, but the may not be around much longer if another medium gains favor. Does this mean that the venerable 3.5 inch Floppy will represent saving information to future generations, or should it be replaced by a different symbol?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tfried on Tuesday December 20 2016, @08:57AM
No, seriously. Never, ever replace a symbol that everbody understands, just because nobody knows where it came from any more. And I am sure if you were to ask a random sample of people to identify the "meaning" of a bunch of common computing symbols, the "floppy"-icon would be probably come out on top of all other icons.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:00AM
Obviously the save icon should be a crying brown child.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tfried on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:42AM
I appreciate the humor in your comment, and I share your sentiment that Unicode has unnecessarily entered muddy waters.
However, you are overshooting the mark. It's perfectly ok and useful to try to modernize existing icons. In the case of the floppy-icon, I'm sure you've seen hundreds of versions of it in your life. Not all of them good, but some really useful enhancements. Made to be discernible in grayscale, for instance, or abstracted to a clearer shape that is easy to recognize at small sizes, etc. And if - e.g. the dominant(?) blue color of the icon were to be associated with one single vendor of physical floppy disks, I could in fact understand a motivation for experimenting with different colors, too. The important thing is: All these variations are still easily recognizable as instances of the same prototype. Thus their meaning is known. Replacing it with something different all-together will wipe the existing association, which is why a complete re-design should be reserved for cases where the icon simply "does not work", i.e. is not understood at all, or - worse - misunderstood to mean something different.
As such, if you are into emoticons, and ASCII-art is not good enough for you, then - from that questionable starting point - it's almost a logical consequence that you will have dozens or hundreds of variants of each emoticon. Again, no problem as long as each instance of a given emoticon is still recognizable. And as long as you don't expect text-based online editors and even character encoding standards to support your crooked need for graphics.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday December 20 2016, @09:22AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Funny) by barbara hudson on Friday December 23 2016, @12:47AM
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