I did consider that, but the 1980 IBM Displaywriter uses a filled downwards triangle, not a house character, to indicate the center line [0].
But you're right that the Displaywriter inspited 1984 DisplayWrite DOS program [1] did use the house character for the same purpose. (Although, CP437 also included a filled downwards triangle character at 0x1F.)
I'd wager serious money that if you put that on a sign and surveyed people, at least in the US, they'd all still conclude it is a "New York" to "London" flight.
What's the use of a communication tool, if it doesn't actually communicate anything to real people?
In my region at least, -5 ~ -2°C, or -5°C ~ -2°C.
If the something is making people confuse, we replace it with a suitable substitution. Re-educating people is really just last resort. Is there anything keeping us from changing it other than ego?
I highly recommend reading this paper^[0] on permacomputing. It explains the concept in depth.
> In this paper, we argue for the potential of permacomputing as a
rich framework for exploring creative design constraints building
on a long history of applying constraints in art, design and cultural
practices.
Fonts are kind of dumb. There's usually nothing actually weird going on. Ligatures are simple character substitutions. What the LIGSPACE is, most likely, is a spacing character added by the designer to align the characters in the ligature correctly. So, the LIGSPACE is just a character like any other and is nothing special. For example, when you hit a space bar, you are inserting a character which doesn't render anything because the designer didn't draw anything there. There's no extra logic.
It's not trivial to display ASCII art as text in html. There's so many ways to mess it up that unless the site is dedicated to ASCII art, a simple image is really preferable.
the Virtual terminal[1] from Asciinema[2] is what I use but that is a lot more difficult than just including a video of it. I got CMS from a very expensive CMS to support Asciinema but it was actually too much effort to be worth it I had to recompile some components make a editor interface etc etc.
Most of those are solved with wrapping it in both <code> and <pre>, and #5 I don't think is even part of "ASCII art" anymore as it wouldn't be just ASCII anymore, but rich-text.
What do you mean? Add far as I know <code><pre> doesn't help with any of those?
Color is very much a part of ASCII art, if we consider ASCII to mean a broader range of different technologies. Just check the stuff in the article, or the stuff on https://16colo.rs/ site.
None of these points seem to be relevant when it comes to the question about ASCII art as text in html vs image. Most of them feel to be no actual problems at all, but only someone vaguely mentioned some keywords in order to 'find' problems?
Aaah. None of these fancier ones were loading for me earlier for some reason, all I got was the clearly-mono-spaced one in the header.
Yeah, for non-ASCII / more sophisticated stuff, images are kinda the only widely-compatible option without adopting a full terminal emulator worth of javascript.
Sure, they might not be pixel-perfect, but if you're doing ASCII art you aren't really aiming for pixel-perfectness anyways, then you'd chose a different medium. It's inherently a medium for the clients to render how they see fit.
You also need to preprocess the text to deal with HTML reserved characters like <
Getting an individual piece of ASCII art to work is often possible reasonably quickly, but the more examples you want to include the more odd edge cases you find.
I wish the article mentioned Computer Nude (1967) by Ken Knowlton. It isn't ASCII, but it is a text mosaic. It was widely circulated at the time, was the first full frontal nude printed in The New York Times, and was somewhat important in the development of computer graphics.
It's JavaScript for the interactive/reactive parts, but the notebook is implemented in a self-contained HTML file: it handles everything from document structure to editing and display. It's also not dependant on 3rd party software (par browser), and is as durable, portable and easy-to-use as any HTML is.
In principle those external dependencies could be rolled together into one document and produce something truly freestanding. Once one decides to inline everything, opportunities arise to produce something simpler and more coherent.
Thanks for this link, this site is much more complete than the submitted one, and also has more filtering options. The only strange thing is that selecting a language changes the syntax highlighting, but the code stays in JavaScript.
My current favorite is https://www.programmingfonts.org/#go-mono (and not just for Go!). Yeah, I prefer serif fonts, apparently I'm in a minority (16 serif fonts vs. 136 sans serif on this site).
But you're right that the Displaywriter inspited 1984 DisplayWrite DOS program [1] did use the house character for the same purpose. (Although, CP437 also included a filled downwards triangle character at 0x1F.)
[0]: https://youtu.be/YnU_woucebE?t=169
[1]: https://www.dosdays.co.uk/topics/Software/ibm_displaywrite.p...