Talk:Bracket

Crystallography

Crystallography uses these things to denote whether a plane or direction is being discussed, and whether it's generic or specific. I have put up a basic account of their use in Crystallography#Notation, but you may want to wait a few days for it to stabilize before you copy it into this article. This may also convince someone to finally flesh out Miller index.--Joel 06:14 & :18, 16 May 2005 (UTC)

Usage in chat

On chatrooms and message boards, actions are put in brackets.

"I know she can't sing, but I like Lindsay Lohan {ducks from flying vegetables}."

There's also the "Insert Item" usage.

"I don't care if [insert nominee here] deserves to be in the hall of fame, I think that Maris should be in."

—Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.172.165 (talk) 05:33 & :34, 6 November 2006

Long lists of Unicode codepoints "beside" each type - for most readers, who are on mobile phones, before each type

Did any WP:think of the reader on mobile? Who thought it would be a good idea to have a long list of detailed Unicode code-points that the mobile reader would have to skip past before getting any content?

Is there a convincing reason to retain the current layout rather than put it at the bottom of the article as is conventional? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 00:03, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

I'd be in favour of putting them back at the bottom. They could be in subsections (Parentheses, Square brackets, etc.) to resolve an earlier complaint that

Organizing it by Unicode sub-range before bracket shape makes no sense, as readers aren't going to know the Unicode sub-ranges before looking things up.

Myself, I had thought about moving them to the bottom of each section in order to avoid the massive infoboxes, which are hard to read in addition to taking up so much space.

Also, if we wanted to put them back in tables, we could take advantage of the {{unichar}} sub-templates like {{unichar/name}}. As said before, The {{unichar}} template has even automatically picked up some HTML entities ...

Lastly, I'm not sure why you're saying Who thought it would be a good idea when the revision history shows it was @Uncle G, and you even spoke with him about this before where he showed a mockup.

— W.andrea (talk) 02:54, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

• • You can blame Drmies for the initial complaint, which also seemed to be that there's just huge lists of data to scroll through. Mobile 'phone users have a mechanism for hiding infoboxes. But any way that one slices it, there's this huge dump of tables in the article, that was just as much a problem for mobile 'phone users at the bottom. The point of doing it this way is that we have all of the articles in Category:Unicode blocks already that do it with huge tables. Our punctuation articles in contrast use {{Infobox punctuation}}. And since it is a straightforward 2-level list we can probably make it collapsible in the infobox.

    The real problem, articulated by SMcCandlish earlier is that, largely because of the mathematical symbols (duplicating Bracket (mathematics)) the infoboxes are long. There is, simply put, almost more data dumping than prose in this article. Fortunately, it takes a pretty extreme 16:9 portrait view window to make the infoboxes be even as long as the prose in the sections, in landscape view the prose readily being longer than the infoboxes, and as I just demonstrated for one of the shorter sections whose infobox threatened to outgrow it that's because our prose is pretty superficial rubbish and actually could be significantly longer. Nowhere do we yet explain what a "tortoise shell bracket" is, for example, or properly explain a Chinese book title mark or proper noun mark.

    Uncle G (talk) 08:04, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

• My "who thought it would be a good idea" was rhetorical (it is not difficult to find the answer). What I mean is this: what must have seemed a good idea at the time is now an overloaded dumpster. So to be more constructive, my counter proposal is to move the tables of codepoints out to the end of the article, into a new section (with subsections if appropriate). That way, the vast majority of readers can just stop reading if they are not interested. Personally, I strongly favour including this information so I don't want it to become so intrusive that a consensus arises to have it deleted completely. As this article stands, the intrusivity threshold has been breached, IMO. (btw, "mobile users can hide infoboxes" as a solution is up there with qu'ils mangent de la brioche. What? Everywhere? because of one article?) --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 11:35, 12 December 2023 (UTC)
  • I'm reading the silence as signifying assent, so within the next few days, I shall move long lists from the side to horizontal rows at the bottom, unless someone puts their head above the parapet to present a case for the defence. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 15:48, 14 December 2023 (UTC)
    • I think that you should instead read the rest of this talk page and Special:Diff/1184384698 as being a strong objection to the old style of a massive Unicode table being half the scrollable length of an article. Write prose, not tables, for goodness' sake! We have a whole category of Unicode table articles elsewhere. This article claims to be about punctuation. Uncle G (talk) 00:18, 16 December 2023 (UTC)

Dubious laundry list of brace names

There's a dubious laundry list of brace names that has grown over the years. I found a definite source for only one. Names like "Scottish bracket" and "French bracket" seem especially dubious, and "twirly bracket" et al. seem like outright slang dictionary territory. I couldn't find sources that supported any of these, except that I can find occurrences of "Tuborgklamme" (not "Tuborg bracket") so that one, amazingly enough, seems to be true but undocumented if it were actually stated as "Tuborgklamme". Uncle G (talk) 08:04, 12 December 2023 (UTC)

• Oh, oops, I may just have deleted that. Did you say "laundry list"? I wonder if young people use that expression still. Drmies (talk) 14:34, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Unicode and HTML encodings for various bracket characters

@Nickps: I'm concerned by your addition of the html codes to the table Bracket#Unicode and HTML encodings for various bracket characters. What is 231C ... #8988; but a hex to decimal conversion? That html column is so mathematically trivial as to be way below the WP:NOTMANUAL threshold.

The table as a whole seems yet another example of the kind of pointless article bloat discussed at talk:A#Proposed deletion of section in this and all the alphabet, so I am at a loss to understand why you would want to add to it given the clear consensus to spring-clean out such detritus? How is it Wikipedia's role to replicate the Unicode standards? 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 22:59, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

@JMF: I agree with that and I think they don't need to be there. The only reason I kept adding them was because the other characters in the table already had them before I started editing. In my opinion, the only ones that should be included are the named entities from List of XML and HTML character entity references for consistency with the infoboxes that also include them. That's why I added them in this edit. Nickps (talk) 23:05, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

I am at a loss to understand why you would want to add to it. Because it's incomplete. If there is consensus to remove it then it should go (and take the other overly long lists of characters that are in the infoboxes with it). But as long as it's there, it should at least have all the characters that belong in it. It's not like there was a pattern behind which characters were in the various lists and which were not. For example, U+0028 ( LEFT PARENTHESIS was listed, obviously, and so was U+FF08 （ FULLWIDTH LEFT PARENTHESIS. But while U+2985 ⦅ LEFT WHITE PARENTHESIS was listed in the Parenthesis infobox, U+FF5F ｟ FULLWIDTH LEFT WHITE PARENTHESIS was not mentioned at all. That makes no sense so I added it to the Unicode table. Nickps (talk) 23:23, 11 April 2024 (UTC)

In your place, I might have saved myself a lot of work and just deleted the whole thing straight off. Off with its head! --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:26, 11 April 2024 (UTC)