4 ms·

IMO 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 be

by awalton 11y ago

IMO 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    Creating 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 :)
    - gherkin0 11y ago
      > Creating 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 However, it would arguably be far more useful. > Perfect is the enemy of... something that (already) works :) ...for creating cute text messages and not much else.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      What you said is pretty much textbook definition of short-sightedness :). Perfect is the enemy of good, therefore in things that are actually important (like critical infrastructure) we should not stop when we reach "good enough" :). Or, worse is sometimes better, but usually it's just worse.
  - cbd1984 11y ago
    > 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. So, how do I get pen-and-paper notes from Montana to New Mexico in less than a minute? It's still within one country, no wars are going on in the region, should be easy, right?
    - SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
      Fax?
    - chris_wot 11y ago
      Scan them and email them.
  - Retra 11y ago
    You can't read "anything in freeform." If I scribble a bunch of sworls on a page, that's not going to be communication. And we can still do that today. Go to the store and buy a pen and some paper.
jug 11y ago
I'm torn on this. The best part is that the emoji are at least getting standardized. I remember the bad days of conveying this by either relying on images or fonts that may not be installed on the target system; especially a cross platform problem. Now one may be relying on Unicode code points that may not be _supported_ by the target font but that feels better to me than the options. What strikes me as odd is that they're adding so many. Sure, it makes sense that Unicode could be kind enough to support conveying happiness or sadness in a message, but "Person doing cartwheel"...? Any alphabet has boundaries for the letters, I think the emojis should have received a boundary too. They are a standardizing organ, why not... Just standardize it? In advance. Treat emojis like a language of emotions. If not we'll soon enough (if not already...) end up with the same problem as before. That just because of the sheer size of the emoji space and the effort needed to design a font for them, we can no longer rely on them all being implemented correctly, which means they are no longer useful as a standardized set of symbols. If you've been there from the start, like Apple, sure then it's no big deal. Just a few new symbols per year to implement. If you're designing a new font to support emojis, you'll risk needing a whole team of designers just for this silly subset of symbols alone. There's also a user interface problem mounting as for how to even pick and organize them all.

by awalton 11y ago

0x0 11y ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  Creating 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 :)
  - gherkin0 11y ago
    > Creating 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 However, it would arguably be far more useful. > Perfect is the enemy of... something that (already) works :) ...for creating cute text messages and not much else.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    What you said is pretty much textbook definition of short-sightedness :). Perfect is the enemy of good, therefore in things that are actually important (like critical infrastructure) we should not stop when we reach "good enough" :). Or, worse is sometimes better, but usually it's just worse.
- cbd1984 11y ago
  > 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. So, how do I get pen-and-paper notes from Montana to New Mexico in less than a minute? It's still within one country, no wars are going on in the region, should be easy, right?
  - SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
    Fax?
  - chris_wot 11y ago
    Scan them and email them.
- Retra 11y ago
  You can't read "anything in freeform." If I scribble a bunch of sworls on a page, that's not going to be communication. And we can still do that today. Go to the store and buy a pen and some paper.

jug 11y ago

I'm torn on this. The best part is that the emoji are at least getting standardized. I remember the bad days of conveying this by either relying on images or fonts that may not be installed on the target system; especially a cross platform problem. Now one may be relying on Unicode code points that may not be _supported_ by the target font but that feels better to me than the options. What strikes me as odd is that they're adding so many. Sure, it makes sense that Unicode could be kind enough to support conveying happiness or sadness in a message, but "Person doing cartwheel"...? Any alphabet has boundaries for the letters, I think the emojis should have received a boundary too. They are a standardizing organ, why not... Just standardize it? In advance. Treat emojis like a language of emotions. If not we'll soon enough (if not already...) end up with the same problem as before. That just because of the sheer size of the emoji space and the effort needed to design a font for them, we can no longer rely on them all being implemented correctly, which means they are no longer useful as a standardized set of symbols. If you've been there from the start, like Apple, sure then it's no big deal. Just a few new symbols per year to implement. If you're designing a new font to support emojis, you'll risk needing a whole team of designers just for this silly subset of symbols alone. There's also a user interface problem mounting as for how to even pick and organize them all.