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Perhaps Unicode could solve the emoji problem once and for all by providing a mechanism for encoding arbitrary .svgs as multi-kilobyte strings of modifier chara
by MrEldritch 8y ago
Perhaps Unicode could solve the emoji problem once and for all by providing a mechanism for encoding arbitrary .svgs as multi-kilobyte strings of modifier characters.
- Dylan16807 8y agoHmm, they did include that block for encoding arbitrary bitmap images. (U+2800)
- titanix2 8y agoU+2800 etc. is for Braille, which is an alphabet. Nothing to do with bitmaps.
- ygra 8y agoI think it was a joke referring to some people using Braille to display black and white images as text, e.g. https://loveeevee.github.io/Dots-Converter/retro.html https://loveeevee.github.io/Dots-Converter/retro.html
- Dylan16807 8y agoYeah. Key to that use is that they didn't pick any specific patterns, they went with every possible combination of 8 dots being present/absent.
- Someone 8y agoNitpick: the U+2800 block specifically isn’t an alphabet. For example, U+2801 is called “Braille Pattern dots-1”. That’s like calling U+0069 “vertical bar with a dot on top”, rather than “Latin small letter I” (Reason for that is that the dot patterns are heavily overloaded and even language specific. German digits are different from US ones, for example)
- wongarsu 8y agoEmojis started being included in Unicode because they were already in the text encodings used by Japenese SMS. Multi-kb glyphs wouldn't exactly fly in SMS.
- MrEldritch 8y agoI dunno, by wildly extrapolating current trends, by 2050 a typical text-based message will already consume several MB of bloat, Javascript, subliminal advertisements, superliminal advertisements, JSONs encoding XML encoding JSONs encoding base64 encodings of..., 128-bit float variable font settings, prayers to the Packet Gnomes, and more Javascript. In comparison, a few extra kb won't seem so bad.
- kalleboo 8y agoJapan has never widely adopted SMS[0]. They have always used proper internet E-mail instead, and more lately, LINE messenger. [0]Once they added global 3G/UMTS support their networks got SMS support, but it's only used by phone number verification services and 2FA, nobody actually sends them. Their homegrown 2G networks before that launched messaging using E-mail.