Emoticons

Internet is an indirect exchange zone, when you talk to someone or writing something, you can not express your emotions because you are not in front of you. That is why we use emoticons (or smiley). They may consist of a sequence of characters or simply a picture or sequence of pictures (animated gif format).

Custom made animated smiley in gif format

Most forums or blog often provide a list of clickable smileys those are automatically inserted into your text. They also use functions that look in your texts textual smileys and replaces them with images automatically. This allows to create a text more readable, more lively.

ASCII art

ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is a standard that defines how characters should be coded on 7 bits. So there is only 128 characters total (95 viewable). You can find on the Internet that gives you ASCII representation of 8 bits of a character (the eighth is still 0).

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). The term is also loosely used to refer to text based art in general. ASCII art can be created with any text editor, and is often used with free-form languages. Most examples of ASCII art require a fixed-width font (non-proportional fonts, as on a traditional typewriter) such as Courier for presentation.

The ASCII art is to create shapes and images with a number of characters limited. You can do this directly or with software that converts your drawings. This gives rather interesting results.

It is common in programs Review decorated by ASCII characters that create boundaries. It is a drift of ASCII art.

Thus, systems that do not read images directly (as in Microsoft Windows command prompt or MS-DOS and terminal on Mac or Linux) can still see shapes that can embellish these tools.

Here is an example:

Example of ASCII art

Ascii Art as an idea coalesced into existence bceause people
wanted more. They wanted more than just your standard Hercules
display Atari or your Monochrome Commodore 64. To meet this
demand, one singular artist, whose name is lost to the annals of
history decided to take the plunge. Instead of text, he (or she)
had the ingenuity to use the characters /, \, |, -, _ and
whatever else came to mind to create words. An amazing idea.

And a perfect one. People latched onto this. Anyone that could
display text could display ascii art. It was fast, compact,
independant of platform type, and one group in particular set
their sights on it the most, the then-thriving Amiga scene. It
was perfect for Bulletin Board Systems, text-based adventures,
for anything they could think of. Perfect then, and to this day
for file descriptions.

 

-History of the PC Ascii Scene
(As viewed by the eyes of one that lived it.)
by Necromancer, 06-Mar-1998

To summarize

• Smilies are widely used in the Web universe.
• The ASCII art used to represent various forms with a limited number of characters.