title: how is the sarcmark implemented?
body: <p><a href="http://www.sarcmark.com/" rel="noreferrer">These people</a> are selling a proprietary exclamation mark for sarcasm, and without going through the Unicode standardisation process, are proposing that it's possible to download this mark (in what format it's not completely clear), and use it in your written communications (to what extent it's not clear). My question is what exactly is being downloaded and how exactly are they transmitting it across a network.</p>
  
  <p>I'm not sure if it's some sort of multilayered sarcastic joke and I don't think it's a nice idea on any level, but I'm curious if they're doing anything clever to implement it and get it to interoperate (curious enough to override my reluctance to add to their word of mouth).</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>They provide an image that you can paste into a document - so far it's a $2 piece of clip art, nothing mysterious about it.</li>
  <li>They provide a font with the new glyph (or is it a character?) - presumably if you were going to send that successfully to someone they'd have to have the same font installed and the message would have to have enough information for the recipient to choose that font for viewing it?</li>
  <li>They claim to have it working for SMS on Blackberries - how do they get that to work? How is the glyph transmitted through the network? The only way I can think of is that they're transmitting Unicode private use codepoints, but those would be tricky to get through an SMS network, wouldn't they?</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>EDIT: There's a vote to close with a "non programming-related" justification. I'm a programmer, I spend a lot of time tracking down problems where ancient and well established characters fail to get transmitted across the network correctly. So when someone claims to be able to invent a character unilaterally and get it to transmit between devices correctly and without degradation, I'm curious, I wonder how one would program it. It's programming-related - it's related to my programming and to the programming of the company that implemented the symbol.</p>
  
  <p>EDIT 2: A basic question, raised by Jeremiah's answer below, that someone who knows about fonts should be able to clarify: does it suffice to provide a font with just the one new glyph in it? What I mean is, if you're viewing a document in say Arial, the system comes across the U+E001 codepoint in the document, and it's not part of the active Arial font, will the system check all of its installed fonts to find one that has a glyph for the codepoint? Or does the new glyph have to be somehow added to every font you intend to use? I'm being vague about the word "system" - I don't know if that functionality is implemented by a word processor or browser application for example, or by some underlying font service in the operating system. </p>