4 ms·

Emojis are a plot to make English-speaking developers care about fixing their code to work with Unicode.

by billpg 8y ago

Dylan16807 8y ago
If only they hadn't tried to cut it down to 16 bits near the start, we could have avoided a lot of the partial support that emojis expose.
- nikbackm 8y ago
  Maybe all Asian scripts was not planned to be included back then? Seems strange they would miscount so grossly otherwise.
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    It's all down to CJK. Originally they allocated 21k codepoints to CJK, and if that was accurate then 16 bits would pretty much fit things. But we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned out of possibly more than 100k total. I can't easily find anything about how this went wrong and they got such a small number.
    - vorg 8y ago
      > we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned If you also count the Unihan variations registered in Unicode's ideographic variation database by various Japanese outfits, encoded using the VS16 to VS255 characters after the codepoint they modify, there's another 8k or 9k unique characters assigned.
- billpg 8y ago
  Ideally, we'd have started from UTF-8 and never even bothered with 16 bit chars in the first place.
Freak_NL 8y ago
Not just Unicode, but Unicode characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). At the very least it is a pleasant unintended consequence. A decade ago support for characters outside of the BMP was hairy (certainly possibly though in PDF's with LaTeX via XeLaTeX), and something you would use if you dabbled in the obscure glyphs contained in it; now it is standard.
pasabagi 8y ago
As somebody not even working within the light-cone of this field, what is going on with emojis? It seems like everything I read about unicode has at least a mention of them. Are they that important to users? Particularly technically challenging? Interesting from a theoretical standpoint?
- billpg 8y ago
  Emojis are in the Unicode range with code-point IDs above 16 bits. (The original Unicode was limited to 16 bit code-points.

Emojis are a plot to make English-speaking developers care about fixing their code to work with Unicode.

by billpg 8y ago

Emojis are a plot to make English-speaking developers care about fixing their code to work with Unicode.

If only they hadn't tried to cut it down to 16 bits near the start, we could have avoided a lot of the partial support that emojis expose.

nikbackm 8y ago
Maybe all Asian scripts was not planned to be included back then? Seems strange they would miscount so grossly otherwise.
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  It's all down to CJK. Originally they allocated 21k codepoints to CJK, and if that was accurate then 16 bits would pretty much fit things. But we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned out of possibly more than 100k total. I can't easily find anything about how this went wrong and they got such a small number.
  - vorg 8y ago
    > we currently have 88k CJK characters assigned If you also count the Unihan variations registered in Unicode's ideographic variation database by various Japanese outfits, encoded using the VS16 to VS255 characters after the codepoint they modify, there's another 8k or 9k unique characters assigned.
billpg 8y ago
Ideally, we'd have started from UTF-8 and never even bothered with 16 bit chars in the first place.

Freak_NL 8y ago

Not just Unicode, but Unicode characters outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP). At the very least it is a pleasant unintended consequence. A decade ago support for characters outside of the BMP was hairy (certainly possibly though in PDF's with LaTeX via XeLaTeX), and something you would use if you dabbled in the obscure glyphs contained in it; now it is standard.

pasabagi 8y ago

As somebody not even working within the light-cone of this field, what is going on with emojis? It seems like everything I read about unicode has at least a mention of them. Are they that important to users? Particularly technically challenging? Interesting from a theoretical standpoint?

billpg 8y ago
Emojis are in the Unicode range with code-point IDs above 16 bits. (The original Unicode was limited to 16 bit code-points.