4 ms·
Those emojis, including the taco, will be there for generation after generation of people to ponder and behold. The taco seems like a pretty transient thing to
by allochthon 11y ago
Those emojis, including the taco, will be there for generation after generation of people to ponder and behold. The taco seems like a pretty transient thing to put into something as important as unicode.
- colordrops 11y agoThere are idiograms used by only a few hundred people, and some that are no longer used except in academic circles included in Unicode. Why would you not include idiograms that are currently in use by millions if not billions of people?
- treve 11y agoThat might be true for the heart, emoticons and several others, but I'm not sure if that statement applies to the taco. Where does it end? Very curious how it's determined when something is worthy of inclusion. At what point is unicode no longer an appropriate place to store graphics?
- jpatokal 11y agoGiven that Unicode already encodes things like U+1F365 FISH CAKE WITH SWIRL DESIGN, I think we can squeeze in the taco as well. https://codepoints.net/U+1F365?lang=en https://codepoints.net/U+1F365?lang=en
- chris_wot 11y agoOnly if it goes through the relevant processes. Look at the nightmare they have around racial and gender lines with some of the human characters. Had it gone through better, then it wouldn't have been a problem. Frankly, I'd like to know the names of the people in these ad hoc committees who approve changes to such an important standard. They need to be made accountable.
- colordrops 11y agoWhere are you located? I'm in the south western US and it's extremely clear that that taco is not going away anytime soon. And idiograms in the Unicode set do not have to be universal to be included, e.g. CJK chars are not used in the western hemisphere.
- stubish 11y agoThe Industry determines what is worthy of inclusion in this Industry Standard. If you want to interoperate with Facebook, you need all the Facebook codes. If you want to interoperate with Line, you need all the Line codes, and Wechat, WhatsApp, Ebay, Alibaba and even Github. You want a Taco code point because the data you are being fed contains Tacos, and you want to know it is a Taco rather than a USER_CODEPOINT+XXXXX. And if you don't care about Tacos, you can ignore it because you know it is a Taco and not something important or corruption. And you can just pass it on down the line to some other process that does care about Tacos.
- alayne 11y agoI'd argue that emoji are going to be culturally short lived and don't record information in the same way that language characters do. It would be better to move them into a separate standard.
- panic 11y agoWhy do you think they'll be short lived? Emoji can be more expressive than pure text, and they have a tendency to take on a meaning that can't quite be described in words. For example, a quick thumbs-up is a great way to show you acknowledged something.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoA few basic emoticons - fine. But like a third of emojis are only legible if you know their name (under the particular program you're using, and most of the icons in popular applications are simply ugly; that's a topic for another rant though). I can understand FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY when I see it, but INFORMATION DESK PERSON, TYPE-4? Is this going to be useful 20 years from now? And then you have stuff like FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH where the picture has little resemblance to the official meaning, which leads one to wonder what your interlocutor meant and how is this icon displayed on their machine.
- awalton 11y agoIMO the entire emoji-in-unicode idea is ridiculous - it's a hack around the inability of allowing arbitrary markup across platforms. But, we're stuck with it because Apple said "we're doing this" after seeing Japanese phone makers do it with arbitrary encodings last decade and the entire rest of the industry caved, completely without regard for how much worse it makes text rendering, processing and layout engines (to which they say "you can just not support it", and instead turn Twitter and the rest of the web into mojibake). But that's just my opinion on the matter. I'm certain I'm wrong and they're actually just the best thing since sliced bread since apparently every woman I've ever met loves the damned things.
- 0x0 11y agoI think it's actually pretty neat that they are regular unicode characters, as they then can be applied in any text field, making for fun stuff like using it in Address book contact names or calendar event names or even the terminal. That wouldn't work if markup was required.
- josteink 11y agoI think that's exactly his point. That we have an entire industry where humans in the past could do anything in freeform (pen and paper) we are now limited to representing that as text only. While our human-needs for adding extra "stuff" is still there. If we had an industry-wide "standard" text-representation (with associated UI-widgets and controls) which had the ability to include more than just text, this wouldn't be a problem and we wouldn't need to standardize each new "symbol" we want to represent as "text" in our applications through Unicode. Using Unicode for this certainly feels like inappropriate piggy-backing and a giant hack.
- 0x0 11y agoCreating a "standard" text-representation UI widget and markup that works universally sounds like a much larger engineering effort compared to adding some code points to an existing standard, with a much larger room for errors and differences in the implementations. Perfect is the enemy of... something that (already) works :)
- EdiX 11y agoWikipedia says that the taco is at least 500 years old, I'm not sure they were hard shell tacos but the description in unicode just says 'taco'.