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News

Yellow Sewol ribbon coming to

computers all around the world


Symbol of mourning for victims of sinking registered as Unicode,

meaning it can be typed as a text character

ribbon0416.jpg

The yellow ribbon that symbolizes commemoration of

the Sewol ferry sinking, Unicode character


The yellow ribbon used to symbolize mourning for the 304 people lost in the 2014 Sewol ferry tragedy now lives on as part of the Unicode character set shared by computers around the world.


Sources with the Unicode Consortium and the group Sewol Alliance said on Apr. 20 that the yellow ribbon had been registered by the consortium as an “adopted character” titled “Remember 0416,” after the date of the sinking (Apr. 16, 2014).


Unicode is the international industry standard character set for text encoding, which was developed to represent all languages of the world, including Korean characters and the Roman alphabet.


Registration of the yellow ribbon means that users are now able to use it as a character on computers all over the world.


Accessible through the Unicode character value 1F397, the symbol was originally called the “reminder ribbon,” but was registered as the adopted character “Remember 0416” with a recent donation to the consortium by a supporter, sources said.


The Unicode Consortium has said on its website that the effects of a single adopted character registration are permanent.


The Sewol Alliance welcomed the registration.


“For the commemorative events for the second anniversary, we worried that interest might drop from the year before,” said Secretary-general Bae Seo-yeong. “From this, we now see that there are many more people working together than we thought, and that they share the belief that the Sewol is an issue that affects everybody.”


“We see the Unicode registration as the result of those sympathies, and our thanks go out to that anonymous supporter,” Bae added.


By Kim Mi-young, staff reporter


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