Comment by bee_rider
2 days ago
They seem to have (if I understand correctly) degree-Celsius and degree-Fahrenheit symbols. So maybe Kelvin is included for consistency, and it just happens to look identical to Latin K?
IMO the confusing bit is giving it a lower case. It is a symbol that happens to look like an upper case, not an actual letter…
And why can't the symbol be a regular old uppercase "K"? Who is this helping?
Unicode wants to be able to preserve round-trip re-encoding from this other standard which has separate letter-K and degree-K characters. Making these small sacrifices for compatibility is how Unicode became the defacto world standard.
The "other standard" in this case being IBM-944. (At least looking at https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode1.0.0/ch06.pdf p. 574 (=110 in the PDF) I only see a mapping from U+212A to that one.)
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I think just using uppercase Latin K is the recommendation.
But, I dunno. Why would anybody apply upper or lower case operators to a temperature measurement? It just seems like a nonsense thing to do.
Maybe not for text to be read again, but might be sensible e.g. for slug or file name generation and the like...
I wonder if you can register a domain with it in the name.
A symbol may look differently than original letter, for example N - №, € - E (Є), S - $, integral, с - ©, TM - ™, a - @, and so on.
However, those symbols doesn't have lower case variants. Moreover, lower case k means kilo-, not a «smaller Kelvin».
Probably useful in a non-latin codeset?
having a dedicated Kelvin symbol preserves the semantics.