I don't have a strong opinion on the interrobang either way, but let's imagine we wanted to start a campaign for it to go mainstream.
The most important thing that could happen would be for a popular auto-correct tool to start substituting it for '?!' and '!?'. MS Word would be ideal.
People would start to get familiar with it when reading other's works. And when authoring, people tend to treat auto-correct like an authority and learn from it. I suspect something similar happened with the ellipsis character in place of three periods.
I have a hunch it would catch on easier in the non-English markets, which may be slightly more accustomed to the inconvenience of using glyphs that aren't always available on every keyboard.
Next, it needs to be included in mobile keyboards. I don't know about iOS, but I can't find it in Gboard for Android.
We could start logging requests and submitting pull requests along those lines.
Now we may not want a viral event. No hashtag campaigns, lest we awaken a louder dissenting crowd. I think the Trojan Horse is a better strategy at first.
I don't know if you've ever played with a font like FiraCode, but it gives you both fancy typographical symbols and compatibility with existing compilers by defining purely-visual translations between certain sequences of characters and purpose-built glyphs. So for example '!=' is rendered as '≠', '=>' as '⇒', '>=' as '≥', etc.
Isn't the whole point of a ligature to visually change a suboptimal representation of something to what it's supposed to represent? E.g. changing != to ≠ visually while the compiler still sees !=?
www isn't representing anything so a ligature doesn't make sense. Same with the comment ligatures, the << and <<< comparisons (shouldn't <> change to ≠?). Even the thinner escape \, which I understand the reasoning for, is probably overkill.
I think you nailed it. More than half of the em dashes and en dashes I type are a result of Word correcting a pair of hyphens in a row. I write "Foo--but not bar" and it renders “Foo—but not bar”. There are no curly quotes on my keyboard either, but any decently professional typesetting uses them of course.
do you really want an em-dash there? they are typically used in sentences to introduce a strong break in a parethetical clause, but without using parentheses :)
Is this the grammar equivalent of people misreading the contrived code snippet—often shortened to focus the reader on the concept being discussed (like on StackOverflow)—for the real thing?
I think the interrobang or its alikes have different functions in written languages and spoken languages. In written languages they all are just a grab bag of mixed-mode reactions including surprise or rhetorical questions. In spoken languages (or corresponding transcripts), I found a distinction between !? and ?! is valuable because there is temporality not usually represented in written languages, and would avoid ‽ for the same reason. Likewise I argue that the number of dots in ellipses is meaningless in written languages (henceforth "standardized" to three dots) but can be actually meaningful in spoken languages.
The most important thing that could happen would be for a popular auto-correct tool to start substituting it for '?!' and '!?'. MS Word would be ideal.
People would start to get familiar with it when reading other's works. And when authoring, people tend to treat auto-correct like an authority and learn from it. I suspect something similar happened with the ellipsis character in place of three periods.
I have a hunch it would catch on easier in the non-English markets, which may be slightly more accustomed to the inconvenience of using glyphs that aren't always available on every keyboard.
Next, it needs to be included in mobile keyboards. I don't know about iOS, but I can't find it in Gboard for Android.
We could start logging requests and submitting pull requests along those lines.
Now we may not want a viral event. No hashtag campaigns, lest we awaken a louder dissenting crowd. I think the Trojan Horse is a better strategy at first.