8 ms·

The rise of emoji

29 points by ascertain 9y ago

lifthrasiir 9y ago
> Both Evans and Danesi set out to explain [...] why we can ignore naysayers who cite them as another example of the erosion of standards. The use of inline pictographs to enrich the text is not bad by itself and actually well supported by their arguments. We had them in instant messengers and chatting systems for a long time. But it is a completely different matter to put them into the Unicode standard. The original set of Emoji was highly culture-dependent (for examle there had been only 10 country flags, as those were the most relevant countries to Japaneses---Unicode correctly recognized this problem and yet picked a bad solution!), defined by glyphs and not by its supposed meaning unlike most scripts in Unicode (that's still true today, and we are still suffering from different Emoji glyphs for multiple vendors), and could be very quickly declining in use for whatever reason (like emoticons trending and declining). So Emoji is quite unsuitable for encoding without a compelling reason. Here the compelling reason turned out to be the interoperability with Japanese carriers [1], and that's why Emoji is an inevitable but ugly addition to the Unicode standard. I feel it is correct to claim both that (the contemporary usage of) Emoji is a great cultural trend and that (the Unicode addition of) Emoji is absurd. [1] The original proposal http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf is very clear in this regard.
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  > Unicode correctly recognized this problem and yet picked a bad solution What do you dislike about their solution? > Emoji is an inevitable but ugly addition of the Unicode standard In fairness, Unicode has long had emoticons. Emoji merely expanded its repertoire.
  - lifthrasiir 9y ago
    > What do you dislike about their solution? Regional indicators (two of them compose to a flag Emoji) can make many Unicode operations inefficient. For example in the grapheme cluster segmentation it should pair two regional indicators [1], so with a very long run of regional indicators it is impossible to partially apply the segmentation (which is often the case). There really should have been two pairs of regional indicators, the first used for the first letter and the second used for the second letter---just like surrogate pairs. [1] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-31.html#GB12 http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-31.html#GB12 > In fairness, Unicode has long had emoticons. Emoji merely expanded its repertoire. Well, Unicode also has dingbats for the compatibility. I don't blame the Unicode consortium for the decision. I do blame those nasty Japanese carriers for permanently harming the Unicode standard though :-)
jwilk 9y ago
Archived copy, which can be read without JS enabled: https://archive.is/tID3G https://archive.is/tID3G
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
acheron 9y ago
"What are letters?" "Kinda like mediaglyphs except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read." -- The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)
- graphitezepp 9y ago
  Read that book just as use of emoji stuff started becoming visible in my circles. Made this quote feel like an intensely accurate predictive statement at the time.
Animats 9y ago
There are way too many emoji, but Unicode can handle them. We need to keep them out of things that have to be typed correctly - domain names, URLs, usernames, passwords, and variable names. Other than that, they're harmless, except that everything now has to handle the astral planes. Most of the emoji are 3-byte Unicode characters. How are IOS 11 animated emoji encoded for transmission?
- jwilk 9y ago
  Huh. What do you mean by "3-byte Unicode characters"?
  - Animats 9y ago
    Unicode planes 1-14.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
  - grzm 9y ago
    An example is UTF-8, where code points are encoded in 1 to 4 8-bit bytes. You can read more about UTF-8 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description
- lifthrasiir 9y ago
  > Most of the emoji are 3-byte Unicode characters. The most recent Emoji standard has 1,182 characters classified as Emoji and 179 of them are in the BMP [1]. Others are encoded as 4 bytes in any UTF encodings. Emoji has been a great way to force the proper non-BMP support to (still) non-conforming softwares for this reason. Well, and if you instead consider the Emoji sequence (which is a unit of being rendered as a single Emoji) the longest sequence is 7 characters long, or 28 bytes long in any UTF encodings, thanks to flags expanded to cover subdivisions [2]. [1] http://unicode.org/Public/emoji/5.0/emoji-data.txt http://unicode.org/Public/emoji/5.0/emoji-data.txt [2] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51-12.html#Sample_Valid_Emoji_Tag_Sequences http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51-12.html#Sample_Vali...
- kiliankoe 9y ago
AndyMcConachie 9y ago
> In The Emoji Code, Vyvyan Evans takes aim at the Unicode Consortium, painting it as an institution in the mould of the Académie française, tyranically subjugating the linguistic will of the people by restricting their free use of cartoon icons, behind it all compelled by Silicon Valley corporate greed, since the members of its technical committee include such blue-chip tech companies as Apple, Google, Facebook and IBM. This is bullshit. I just finished reading this book and Evans does nothing of the sort. Evans is a respected linguist who takes his training and applies it to emoji. I also have some training in linguistics and the only thing that really bothered me about the book is that it wasn't academic enough. I thought it was a bit too pop-sci, but this just means it wasn't written with people like me in mind. It was written for a more lay audience and that's OK. Evans does a very good job of explaining complex subjects to people without any prior exposure to academic linguistics. In general, The Emoji Code is a good book. I just would have preferred something a bit deeper. The real strength in Evans book for me was his discussion of Emoji's metonymic and metaphorical qualities. This helped me place it in a context of what I already knew in cog-ling. But I'm really digressing here. It's a good book for a non-academic audience. And this review is kinda click baity.
emodendroket 9y ago
I mean, maybe I'm alone here, but I find it a little upsetting we can't have country-specific variants of Chinese characters because it'd take up too much code space, but we can have a gazillion emoji.
eukara 9y ago
Reading this article I got reminded of Google's hairy heart emoji... https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/yellow-heart/ https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/yellow-heart/

29 points by ascertain 9y ago

> Both Evans and Danesi set out to explain [...] why we can ignore naysayers who cite them as another example of the erosion of standards. The use of inline pictographs to enrich the text is not bad by itself and actually well supported by their arguments. We had them in instant messengers and chatting systems for a long time. But it is a completely different matter to put them into the Unicode standard. The original set of Emoji was highly culture-dependent (for examle there had been only 10 country flags, as those were the most relevant countries to Japaneses---Unicode correctly recognized this problem and yet picked a bad solution!), defined by glyphs and not by its supposed meaning unlike most scripts in Unicode (that's still true today, and we are still suffering from different Emoji glyphs for multiple vendors), and could be very quickly declining in use for whatever reason (like emoticons trending and declining). So Emoji is quite unsuitable for encoding without a compelling reason. Here the compelling reason turned out to be the interoperability with Japanese carriers [1], and that's why Emoji is an inevitable but ugly addition to the Unicode standard. I feel it is correct to claim both that (the contemporary usage of) Emoji is a great cultural trend and that (the Unicode addition of) Emoji is absurd. [1] The original proposal http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf is very clear in this regard.

TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
> Unicode correctly recognized this problem and yet picked a bad solution What do you dislike about their solution? > Emoji is an inevitable but ugly addition of the Unicode standard In fairness, Unicode has long had emoticons. Emoji merely expanded its repertoire.
- lifthrasiir 9y ago
  > What do you dislike about their solution? Regional indicators (two of them compose to a flag Emoji) can make many Unicode operations inefficient. For example in the grapheme cluster segmentation it should pair two regional indicators [1], so with a very long run of regional indicators it is impossible to partially apply the segmentation (which is often the case). There really should have been two pairs of regional indicators, the first used for the first letter and the second used for the second letter---just like surrogate pairs. [1] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-31.html#GB12 http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-31.html#GB12 > In fairness, Unicode has long had emoticons. Emoji merely expanded its repertoire. Well, Unicode also has dingbats for the compatibility. I don't blame the Unicode consortium for the decision. I do blame those nasty Japanese carriers for permanently harming the Unicode standard though :-)

jwilk 9y ago

Archived copy, which can be read without JS enabled: https://archive.is/tID3G https://archive.is/tID3G

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

acheron 9y ago

"What are letters?" "Kinda like mediaglyphs except they're all black, and they're tiny, they don't move, they're old and boring and really hard to read." -- The Diamond Age (Neal Stephenson)

graphitezepp 9y ago
Read that book just as use of emoji stuff started becoming visible in my circles. Made this quote feel like an intensely accurate predictive statement at the time.

Animats 9y ago

There are way too many emoji, but Unicode can handle them. We need to keep them out of things that have to be typed correctly - domain names, URLs, usernames, passwords, and variable names. Other than that, they're harmless, except that everything now has to handle the astral planes. Most of the emoji are 3-byte Unicode characters. How are IOS 11 animated emoji encoded for transmission?

jwilk 9y ago
Huh. What do you mean by "3-byte Unicode characters"?
- Animats 9y ago
  Unicode planes 1-14.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode
- grzm 9y ago
  An example is UTF-8, where code points are encoded in 1 to 4 8-bit bytes. You can read more about UTF-8 here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description
lifthrasiir 9y ago
> Most of the emoji are 3-byte Unicode characters. The most recent Emoji standard has 1,182 characters classified as Emoji and 179 of them are in the BMP [1]. Others are encoded as 4 bytes in any UTF encodings. Emoji has been a great way to force the proper non-BMP support to (still) non-conforming softwares for this reason. Well, and if you instead consider the Emoji sequence (which is a unit of being rendered as a single Emoji) the longest sequence is 7 characters long, or 28 bytes long in any UTF encodings, thanks to flags expanded to cover subdivisions [2]. [1] http://unicode.org/Public/emoji/5.0/emoji-data.txt http://unicode.org/Public/emoji/5.0/emoji-data.txt [2] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51-12.html#Sample_Valid_Emoji_Tag_Sequences http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51-12.html#Sample_Vali...
kiliankoe 9y ago

AndyMcConachie 9y ago

> In The Emoji Code, Vyvyan Evans takes aim at the Unicode Consortium, painting it as an institution in the mould of the Académie française, tyranically subjugating the linguistic will of the people by restricting their free use of cartoon icons, behind it all compelled by Silicon Valley corporate greed, since the members of its technical committee include such blue-chip tech companies as Apple, Google, Facebook and IBM. This is bullshit. I just finished reading this book and Evans does nothing of the sort. Evans is a respected linguist who takes his training and applies it to emoji. I also have some training in linguistics and the only thing that really bothered me about the book is that it wasn't academic enough. I thought it was a bit too pop-sci, but this just means it wasn't written with people like me in mind. It was written for a more lay audience and that's OK. Evans does a very good job of explaining complex subjects to people without any prior exposure to academic linguistics. In general, The Emoji Code is a good book. I just would have preferred something a bit deeper. The real strength in Evans book for me was his discussion of Emoji's metonymic and metaphorical qualities. This helped me place it in a context of what I already knew in cog-ling. But I'm really digressing here. It's a good book for a non-academic audience. And this review is kinda click baity.

emodendroket 9y ago

I mean, maybe I'm alone here, but I find it a little upsetting we can't have country-specific variants of Chinese characters because it'd take up too much code space, but we can have a gazillion emoji.

eukara 9y ago

Reading this article I got reminded of Google's hairy heart emoji... https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/yellow-heart/ https://emojipedia.org/google/android-4.4/yellow-heart/