Authored by: evening on Wednesday, December 21 2005 @ 05:25 PM

There are some really cool ones in there. I'll take the outdated graphics/
design -- they're still a million times better than most of the crap in the
stores!

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Authored by: evening on Wednesday, December 21 2005 @ 09:51 PM

But what about the Santa cards? What was he for??

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Authored by: billsimmon on Wednesday, December 21 2005 @ 11:45 PM

Apparently he's "Grandfather Frost."

"All of the cards in the linked to collection are, in fact, New Year’s cards, not Christmas cards – they bear the New Year greeting С Новым годом! (Pronounced: s’novym godom). New Year’s was the main holiday celebrated in the former Soviet Union (officially atheist), replete with a New Year’s tree and the appearance of “Dyet Moros” (Grandfather Frost) – not Santa. Christmas was banned after the 1917 revolution and not celebrated again until 1992. Also, in Russia, Christmas is celebrated by the Orthodox church according to the Julian calendar, on January 7, and was/is a much different type of celebration than New Years."

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Authored by: DanZ on Thursday, December 22 2005 @ 12:26 AM

Wow, С Новым годом! Now THAT's stylin'!

On the other hand: ☺ ☻ ☼ ♀ ♂ ♪♫ ⅛⅜⅝⅞ ℅ℓ№™Ω℮∂∆∏∑∞∩∫≈

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Authored by: Ntodd on Thursday, December 22 2005 @ 08:15 AM

Beat me to it. Speaking of beating...yob tvoyu mat! And a very snowy goddamn to all!

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Don't mess with a man with a Wayback Machine. I can make it so you were never born.

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Authored by: DanZ on Thursday, December 22 2005 @ 11:45 AM

goddamn to you as well. speaking of which, i was looking for unicode or xml entity tables to get some of those characters and found something weird that i just don't have the experience to understand: if you google a particular code, like ≅ (≅), google doesn't even return a result set - i mean no result, not a result of "0 records". the page shows a header and footer, but no content.

I googled "&foo", "&#foo" and "&#foo;" and got a result. the null result only happens w/ a numerical value. anybody have a clue?

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Authored by: JIMO on Thursday, December 22 2005 @ 07:11 PM

This string "&#8773", when typed in alone, returns a result set, so it must not be the problem.

This thing "≅", whatever the hell it is, must be throwing some kinda parsing error on Google's end, because, when typed in alone, the results you mentioned are returned, or not returned, however you want to look at it. The server's probably getting some internal error that it's not programmed to pass on to the client, hence the header and footer surrounding nothing. Maybe we can all keep clicking "search" for that odd character and fill up core or error files past maximum disk space on their servers until we bring Google to its knees.

Sometime around the year 2063.

BTW, is that happy Russian kid riding an anti-capitalist warhead?

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There's always gotta be a reason for something.

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Authored by: DanZ on Friday, December 23 2005 @ 08:12 AM

you have to put the ";" on the end, then ALL numerical values return a null.

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Authored by: JIMO on Friday, December 23 2005 @ 07:14 PM

Ooooooooh. Well, the analysis still stands until some other smart guy tells me how wrong I am again.

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There's always gotta be a reason for something.

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Authored by: AlexC on Sunday, December 25 2005 @ 12:52 PM

There are many types of escapes and encodings in use in the Web.

When outputting something in HTML you can use XML escaping, which is either done using XML entities like "eacute" or Unicode escapes like "". This gets rendered by modern browsers. Or, if you specify the correct encoding format in your document headers, you can specify funky characters "directly" as a series of non-ascii bytes -- which has the advantage that it "looks right" in text editors, but the disadvantage that byte ecodings often don't survive transport. Witness hte disasters that happen when "mac quotes" turn into incomprehensible gibberish when viewed on a Windows box.

When you're entering something into a form field, you can't use HTML/XML escapes. it's usually encoded twice: once as UTF-8, and once as "URL encoding", which has a bunch of percent signs in it.

So, what does this mean? Well, try copying this text:

Новым

and paste it into Google's search box. You'll see results. Now look at the url: it's got the substring

q=%D0%9D%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%BC

which is the URL-encoded version of the UTF-8 encoding of the Unicode characters

1053, 1086, 1074, 1099, 1084

which would be HTML escaped as

Новым

After I post this I'll see what got lost in translation.

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Authored by: AlexC on Sunday, December 25 2005 @ 01:34 PM

Geez, Bill, can you reply to-- I mean, delete the previous 2 comments?

which would be HTML escaped as

& #1053; & #1086; & #1074; & #1099; & #1084;

only without the spaces after the ampersands.

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Authored by: billsimmon on Sunday, December 25 2005 @ 04:51 PM

done. I have repliedeleted.

-B

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