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Character sets in general will certainly continue to grow — look no further than the ever-expanding emoji set. Unicode is designed to be able to incorporate new

Character sets in general will certainly continue to grow — look no further than the ever-expanding emoji set. Unicode is designed to be able to incorporate new characters. Whether the CJKV¹ set will grow is another matter entirely. I expect that there will be a couple more extensions for characters found in historical sources; the goal of the Unicode standard is — roughly speaking — to be able to digitize any and all existing texts, after all. But for actual new characters to be added they would first have to become popular enough to warrant inclusion. Neither Chinese nor Japanese is a language that produces new Chinese characters like they did historically. The barrier to get a character excepted beyond a fringe group is quite high — in any language — and there really is no strong need to create new characters. 1: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese (the latter two historically used Chinese characters as well)

nabla9 8y ago
Emojis are mistake and added too soon. We end up with standard that is full of short lived symbols from 2000-2025 that were once in a fashion and new generations of people will abandon them for something else when the culture changes. Adding new stuff (excluding old languages) to Unicode should have a delay, at least 20-25 years from proposal to the standard (roughly a generation). In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as :), smiley, -smiley-, smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is free to change it into a picture.
- fermuch 8y ago
  Weren't emojis added because Japanese phones had them, since a long, long time (before smartphones), and the main pursuit of unicode is to be able to represent all written characters? The first emojis would be close to the 20 year lapse now, and they are the most used.
  - jsjohnst 8y ago
    1999, so yeah, the first set of almost 200 emoji are nearly 20 years old. And yes, they were added first in Japan and didn’t become a western fad until after the iphone added them (not claiming the iphone was the catalyst, but the timing was about the same).
  - mcguire 8y ago
    The phrase "since a long, long time," applied to mobile phones, is causing me a certain amount of bogglement.
- bootlooped 8y ago
  I'm also suspicious of the cost and value of adding emoji, but what is the alternative? They are here, they need to be represented somehow. If Unicode doesn't do it it's possible that fragmented and propriety encoding systems would fill the vacuum.
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  Emoji already existed in documented (not to mention frequent) use when they were added to Unicode. As other commenters noted, the emoji originated in Japan and were encoded in the character sets used by mobile phones. Not adding them was not an option, because it would mean Unicode wouldn't be able to encode Japanese emails and text messages. What happened in the past few years is that the emoji set was updated, because the Japanese core set missed symbols when considered from a global perspective. In some cases emoji have also been added pro-actively in cooperation with smartphone OS vendors; this is a point of contention, but I think it makes sense in this case. > We end up with standard that is full of short lived symbols from 2000-2025 […] That's fine. There is plenty of space in the Unicode standard. It also contains whole swaths of glyphs that were only used in some small country for a few decades, or that are obscure to the point of being almost irrelevant. But that is what Unicode is for. It is a means to encode the texts we produce as humans¹, not a proscriptive table of characters we ought to use. 1: Aliens too I guess, as long as they can provide proof of prior and significant enough use.
  - rabidrat 8y ago
    > That's fine. There is plenty of space in the Unicode standard. But there is not infinite time from a font creator. Already it is impossible to know which of the newer characters will be supported by which OS/fonts/etc. Unicode characters are all but useless if they can't be displayed.
    - Freak_NL 8y ago
      That's fine too. There is no need for every font to have support for Byzantine Musical Symbols or Coptic Epact Numbers. Operating Systems tend to have a collection of fonts installed that can handle every common use case. If you depend on glyphs introduced in special use areas you are more than likely aware of the need to install a special font. Sure, you may need to be aware as a developer that a new character introduced in last month's Unicode update isn't likely to be supported yet, but that's no different from any other technology like CSS.
      - 8y ago
- baddox 8y ago
  > In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as :), smiley, -smiley-, smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is free to change it into a pictur Sure. It’s also possible to encode any non-ASCII text as ASCII as ::yen-sign:: or ::em-dash:: or ::cyrillic-capital-letter-schwa:: and implement your own algorithm to replace them with their intended symbols. We just happen to have one fairly widely agreed upon standard for doing that, and it’s Unicode.
- genericid 8y ago
  So you think that emojis should not have been added to Unicode because, in 10 years, they will be obsolete like Linear A (U+10600..U+1077F)?
dingo_bat 8y ago
> But for actual new characters to be added they would first have to become popular enough to warrant inclusion. How would a character become popular if people cannot type it?
- Freak_NL 8y ago
  By tentatively placing it in the Private Use Area for example, or by organising support for it via other means (e.g., the German ẞ or ⏻).

nabla9 8y ago

Emojis are mistake and added too soon. We end up with standard that is full of short lived symbols from 2000-2025 that were once in a fashion and new generations of people will abandon them for something else when the culture changes. Adding new stuff (excluding old languages) to Unicode should have a delay, at least 20-25 years from proposal to the standard (roughly a generation). In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as :), smiley, -smiley-, smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is free to change it into a picture.

fermuch 8y ago
Weren't emojis added because Japanese phones had them, since a long, long time (before smartphones), and the main pursuit of unicode is to be able to represent all written characters? The first emojis would be close to the 20 year lapse now, and they are the most used.
- jsjohnst 8y ago
  1999, so yeah, the first set of almost 200 emoji are nearly 20 years old. And yes, they were added first in Japan and didn’t become a western fad until after the iphone added them (not claiming the iphone was the catalyst, but the timing was about the same).
- mcguire 8y ago
  The phrase "since a long, long time," applied to mobile phones, is causing me a certain amount of bogglement.
bootlooped 8y ago
I'm also suspicious of the cost and value of adding emoji, but what is the alternative? They are here, they need to be represented somehow. If Unicode doesn't do it it's possible that fragmented and propriety encoding systems would fill the vacuum.
Freak_NL 8y ago
Emoji already existed in documented (not to mention frequent) use when they were added to Unicode. As other commenters noted, the emoji originated in Japan and were encoded in the character sets used by mobile phones. Not adding them was not an option, because it would mean Unicode wouldn't be able to encode Japanese emails and text messages. What happened in the past few years is that the emoji set was updated, because the Japanese core set missed symbols when considered from a global perspective. In some cases emoji have also been added pro-actively in cooperation with smartphone OS vendors; this is a point of contention, but I think it makes sense in this case. > We end up with standard that is full of short lived symbols from 2000-2025 […] That's fine. There is plenty of space in the Unicode standard. It also contains whole swaths of glyphs that were only used in some small country for a few decades, or that are obscure to the point of being almost irrelevant. But that is what Unicode is for. It is a means to encode the texts we produce as humans¹, not a proscriptive table of characters we ought to use. 1: Aliens too I guess, as long as they can provide proof of prior and significant enough use.
- rabidrat 8y ago
  > That's fine. There is plenty of space in the Unicode standard. But there is not infinite time from a font creator. Already it is impossible to know which of the newer characters will be supported by which OS/fonts/etc. Unicode characters are all but useless if they can't be displayed.
  - Freak_NL 8y ago
    That's fine too. There is no need for every font to have support for Byzantine Musical Symbols or Coptic Epact Numbers. Operating Systems tend to have a collection of fonts installed that can handle every common use case. If you depend on glyphs introduced in special use areas you are more than likely aware of the need to install a special font. Sure, you may need to be aware as a developer that a new character introduced in last month's Unicode update isn't likely to be supported yet, but that's no different from any other technology like CSS.
    - 8y ago
baddox 8y ago
> In the meantime it's possible to insert emoji into text as :), smiley, -smiley-, smiley.jpg, ::smiley:: or whatever you want and the system you use is free to change it into a pictur Sure. It’s also possible to encode any non-ASCII text as ASCII as ::yen-sign:: or ::em-dash:: or ::cyrillic-capital-letter-schwa:: and implement your own algorithm to replace them with their intended symbols. We just happen to have one fairly widely agreed upon standard for doing that, and it’s Unicode.
genericid 8y ago
So you think that emojis should not have been added to Unicode because, in 10 years, they will be obsolete like Linear A (U+10600..U+1077F)?

dingo_bat 8y ago

> But for actual new characters to be added they would first have to become popular enough to warrant inclusion. How would a character become popular if people cannot type it?

Freak_NL 8y ago
By tentatively placing it in the Private Use Area for example, or by organising support for it via other means (e.g., the German ẞ or ⏻).