10 ms·

Emoji, part 6c: to infinity and beyond?

31 points by breadbox 7y ago

jstewartmobile 7y ago
A regression to hieroglyphics, a collation and rendering nightmare, a security morass, AND a volley in the culture wars... Unicode is the gift that keeps on giving.
- a1369209993 7y ago
  We really need a non-broken universal character set. Is anyone actually working on that?
  - GuB-42 7y ago
    Yes, that's what the Unicode consortium is doing. If you look at https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/ https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/ you will see that emoji is just a small part of it. I know that there is some controversy, in particular regarding han unification, but in practice, Unicode works well enough.
- blueline 7y ago
  >regression how? it's just another way to communicate a thought/feeling/idea.
- 0815test 7y ago
  Why should we blame Unicode for this? Emoji-like features were used for a long time on Internet forums, in SMS-like mobile apps, and even as "dingbats" in printed text. Emojis in Unicode are simply standardizing support for this long-term practice and making it interoperable across systems.
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Has anyone here integrated emoji web picker in their website/web app? What's the recommended flow. I see that the library by OneSignal is rated high[1], but it's 2 years since updated; I guess it misses out on few emoji sprites. Isn't it high time input type=emoji is made a standard or is it a bad idea? [1]:https://github.com/OneSignal/emoji-picker https://github.com/OneSignal/emoji-picker
- reaperducer 7y ago
  Wrike has an emoji picker, but we don't use it much in our group because it's so small that it's hard to make out what the characters are supposed to be.
- deathanatos 7y ago
  I feel like emoji input is better handled by the user's OS, so that each website out there doesn't need to reinvent the wheel and keep it up to date. But, that said, I'm not sure what support is like for such things. About the best I've seen is OS X's character input. (The dialog that appears on Command+Control+Space.) Linux has IBus, but it could be better. I've no idea if Windows ever grew anything. (I haven't used it since about Vista.)
  - uryga 7y ago
    Windows 10 got an emoji picker some time ago, opened by `Win+period` or `Win+semicolon`. it's okay, except that the emoji search seems to use the current keyboard language and not the system language, which is kind of annoying. I don't want to have to remember which language my keyboard is set to to search for a plane emoji!
- frutiger 7y ago
  Shouldn’t the OS allow emoji (or arbitrary unicode) input? macOS & iOS do, and probably many others.
- kccqzy 7y ago
  Emojis are what normal people consider "characters," not entire fields unto themselves. Would input=emoji accept pure emoji without text? What if people want to mix emojis and normal text?
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    > Emojis are what normal people consider "characters" I'm pretty sure emoji are what normal people consider images. Their implementation as characters is a mistake, and the source of several problems that normal people have with them. (Most notably, imagining that the person you're talking to sees the same thing you sent.)
reaperducer 7y ago
I like emoji, and I enjoyed using them for a while. But since it's become politicized by the manufactured outrage industry, I just stick to my old-school 1980's emoticons. Nobody ever got fake offended by :)
- apcragg 7y ago
  Huh that's weird. It's been my experience that I see far,far more comments from people like you who are upset over "manufactured outrage" than people who are actually outraged. It's odd how much people feel the need to signal that they don't get Outraged™ like everyone else.
  - fredsted 7y ago
    >I see far,far more comments from people like you who are upset over "manufactured outrage" than people who are actually outraged I'd venture that you aren't very active on Twitter?
    - apcragg 7y ago
      Very active on Twitter, actually.
    - seandougall 7y ago
      Amazing how different our experiences can be. I see Twitter drowning in that sort of thing whenever I hop on, along with the related complaint about “special treatment!!!1” whenever inequities get addressed.
      - sonnyblarney 7y ago
        "whenever inequities get addressed" The whole point is not that people are upset over 'inequities being addressed' - it's that they do not necessarily feel that their are true inequities. The choice of your words kind of indicates the bias in perspective, not that it's wrong, but those words might be 'talking past the other' in the issue. From the article: 'a picture of a yellow person was still interpreted as white'. Well, so what? Is that really an 'inequity'? Who was perceiving it, why, and does it actually matter? Maybe it does, but there's a good chance that it does not. A 'yellow man in work outfit' - this is gendered, surely, but we live in a gendered world. Is it sexist? Possibly but probably not. We could put a woman, surely, but then what about non-binaries? Intersex? Transgender? It's probably worthwhile to have the discussion - but I'm afraid this discussion will not end. Case and point, a Guardian article I read recently demanding an end to the notion that 'family is two people with 1+ children'. Reasonable. So then how do we integrated this into emojis? The line has to be drawn, and wherever we draw it, it's going to be a little bit arbitrary and exclude some. We're all a little special and irrespective how how normative we may be in one context, we're not in another and that's that. (Saying this is a waspy male who's been an immigrant/minority in a few places including where I live now). We see portrayals of people every day - it doesn't mean that these portrayals are politicized or represent anything. FYI - the article refers to kind of a reduced concern among pop culture, which I think is partly what I'm getting at - this venture is getting a little pointless to most people, even 'allies'. We can be nice and reasonable people and still move on without being in a permanent culture war.
gourlaysama 7y ago
The 8-part series this comes from (starting here [1]) was a really good read. Very informative, regardless of one's stance on emoji. [1] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-beginning/ https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-be...
sonnyblarney 7y ago
I wonder if doing this in Unicode was a huge mistake. Reading this article seems to me we are pulling the thread of a sweater, and getting caught in an unsolvable intersection of intersectionalist social issues (pun intended!). FYI I'm not taking sides other than to say we live in an actually diverse world and people have different social mores wether we like them or not, this talk will never end. Maybe we should just have allowed 'svg' images into text, and you pick whatever you want to send to that person, and they see what you sent and that's that. Then anyone can do anything, publicly, privately, whatever. It's already getting hard with Emojis getting into text and passwords, it's making it just ugly. Everyone could then 'do their own' thing and that's it. We also could be past the peak of this emoji trend, they are here to stay in some ways, but I don't think the specificity is really that-that important. We just don't use most of these characters very often at all.
- earenndil 7y ago
  Alternately: We have all this unused space with which to send characters. Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?
  - sonnyblarney 7y ago
    "Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?" Because 'bandwidth' and 'extra unicode spaces' are effectively irrelevant to the situation. This is a very common psychological dilemma among engineers - we tend to think of 'sizes we can measure' and 'performance'. When often the issues are not relevant. It would be like adding a $500 gadget to your car that hangs out the back to go 0.01 cents better fuel mileage. Emojis are turning into a mess - every time I grab user content these days, I have to flush for weird combinations of characters. Worse: the representation is not only different in terms of images, but some editors combine Emojis differently - resulting in different numbers of characters. There should be 20 emojis - they should be in the BMP (not extended char set) - and that should be it. Then, otherwise, you send SVGs. You get the added benefit of having 'whatever you want'. If there are some common rules around image sizes etc. we could be ok. SVGs are generally small thankfully. Much bigger than text, but still relatively small.
esilver 7y ago
Important to point out that the linked article, in addition to being highly-informative and well-researched is also an exemplary application of type design worthy of emulation. If you’re running a SAAS business you can admire it; if you publish a blog or editorial site by all means copy it.
- pluma 7y ago
  However if the entire point of your article is to talk about how emoji look, it's a terrible idea to include them verbatim when discussing a specific design. It's clear that in certain cases the article talks about a reference design or how the emojis are supposed to look. They likely checked in a browser on macOS to make sure it reads correctly, too. But good luck if you're on Windows or Android. Apparently the Microsoft mage is a wizard with a white beard. Not exactly "gender neutral".

31 points by breadbox 7y ago

A regression to hieroglyphics, a collation and rendering nightmare, a security morass, AND a volley in the culture wars... Unicode is the gift that keeps on giving.

a1369209993 7y ago
We really need a non-broken universal character set. Is anyone actually working on that?
- GuB-42 7y ago
  Yes, that's what the Unicode consortium is doing. If you look at https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/ https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/ you will see that emoji is just a small part of it. I know that there is some controversy, in particular regarding han unification, but in practice, Unicode works well enough.
blueline 7y ago
>regression how? it's just another way to communicate a thought/feeling/idea.
0815test 7y ago
Why should we blame Unicode for this? Emoji-like features were used for a long time on Internet forums, in SMS-like mobile apps, and even as "dingbats" in printed text. Emojis in Unicode are simply standardizing support for this long-term practice and making it interoperable across systems.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

Has anyone here integrated emoji web picker in their website/web app? What's the recommended flow. I see that the library by OneSignal is rated high[1], but it's 2 years since updated; I guess it misses out on few emoji sprites. Isn't it high time input type=emoji is made a standard or is it a bad idea? [1]:https://github.com/OneSignal/emoji-picker https://github.com/OneSignal/emoji-picker

reaperducer 7y ago
Wrike has an emoji picker, but we don't use it much in our group because it's so small that it's hard to make out what the characters are supposed to be.
deathanatos 7y ago
I feel like emoji input is better handled by the user's OS, so that each website out there doesn't need to reinvent the wheel and keep it up to date. But, that said, I'm not sure what support is like for such things. About the best I've seen is OS X's character input. (The dialog that appears on Command+Control+Space.) Linux has IBus, but it could be better. I've no idea if Windows ever grew anything. (I haven't used it since about Vista.)
- uryga 7y ago
  Windows 10 got an emoji picker some time ago, opened by `Win+period` or `Win+semicolon`. it's okay, except that the emoji search seems to use the current keyboard language and not the system language, which is kind of annoying. I don't want to have to remember which language my keyboard is set to to search for a plane emoji!
frutiger 7y ago
Shouldn’t the OS allow emoji (or arbitrary unicode) input? macOS & iOS do, and probably many others.
kccqzy 7y ago
Emojis are what normal people consider "characters," not entire fields unto themselves. Would input=emoji accept pure emoji without text? What if people want to mix emojis and normal text?
- thaumasiotes 7y ago
  > Emojis are what normal people consider "characters" I'm pretty sure emoji are what normal people consider images. Their implementation as characters is a mistake, and the source of several problems that normal people have with them. (Most notably, imagining that the person you're talking to sees the same thing you sent.)

reaperducer 7y ago

I like emoji, and I enjoyed using them for a while. But since it's become politicized by the manufactured outrage industry, I just stick to my old-school 1980's emoticons. Nobody ever got fake offended by :)

apcragg 7y ago
Huh that's weird. It's been my experience that I see far,far more comments from people like you who are upset over "manufactured outrage" than people who are actually outraged. It's odd how much people feel the need to signal that they don't get Outraged™ like everyone else.
- fredsted 7y ago
  >I see far,far more comments from people like you who are upset over "manufactured outrage" than people who are actually outraged I'd venture that you aren't very active on Twitter?
  - apcragg 7y ago
    Very active on Twitter, actually.
  - seandougall 7y ago
    Amazing how different our experiences can be. I see Twitter drowning in that sort of thing whenever I hop on, along with the related complaint about “special treatment!!!1” whenever inequities get addressed.
    - sonnyblarney 7y ago
      "whenever inequities get addressed" The whole point is not that people are upset over 'inequities being addressed' - it's that they do not necessarily feel that their are true inequities. The choice of your words kind of indicates the bias in perspective, not that it's wrong, but those words might be 'talking past the other' in the issue. From the article: 'a picture of a yellow person was still interpreted as white'. Well, so what? Is that really an 'inequity'? Who was perceiving it, why, and does it actually matter? Maybe it does, but there's a good chance that it does not. A 'yellow man in work outfit' - this is gendered, surely, but we live in a gendered world. Is it sexist? Possibly but probably not. We could put a woman, surely, but then what about non-binaries? Intersex? Transgender? It's probably worthwhile to have the discussion - but I'm afraid this discussion will not end. Case and point, a Guardian article I read recently demanding an end to the notion that 'family is two people with 1+ children'. Reasonable. So then how do we integrated this into emojis? The line has to be drawn, and wherever we draw it, it's going to be a little bit arbitrary and exclude some. We're all a little special and irrespective how how normative we may be in one context, we're not in another and that's that. (Saying this is a waspy male who's been an immigrant/minority in a few places including where I live now). We see portrayals of people every day - it doesn't mean that these portrayals are politicized or represent anything. FYI - the article refers to kind of a reduced concern among pop culture, which I think is partly what I'm getting at - this venture is getting a little pointless to most people, even 'allies'. We can be nice and reasonable people and still move on without being in a permanent culture war.

gourlaysama 7y ago

The 8-part series this comes from (starting here [1]) was a really good read. Very informative, regardless of one's stance on emoji. [1] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-beginning/ https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-be...

sonnyblarney 7y ago

I wonder if doing this in Unicode was a huge mistake. Reading this article seems to me we are pulling the thread of a sweater, and getting caught in an unsolvable intersection of intersectionalist social issues (pun intended!). FYI I'm not taking sides other than to say we live in an actually diverse world and people have different social mores wether we like them or not, this talk will never end. Maybe we should just have allowed 'svg' images into text, and you pick whatever you want to send to that person, and they see what you sent and that's that. Then anyone can do anything, publicly, privately, whatever. It's already getting hard with Emojis getting into text and passwords, it's making it just ugly. Everyone could then 'do their own' thing and that's it. We also could be past the peak of this emoji trend, they are here to stay in some ways, but I don't think the specificity is really that-that important. We just don't use most of these characters very often at all.

earenndil 7y ago
Alternately: We have all this unused space with which to send characters. Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?
- sonnyblarney 7y ago
  "Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?" Because 'bandwidth' and 'extra unicode spaces' are effectively irrelevant to the situation. This is a very common psychological dilemma among engineers - we tend to think of 'sizes we can measure' and 'performance'. When often the issues are not relevant. It would be like adding a $500 gadget to your car that hangs out the back to go 0.01 cents better fuel mileage. Emojis are turning into a mess - every time I grab user content these days, I have to flush for weird combinations of characters. Worse: the representation is not only different in terms of images, but some editors combine Emojis differently - resulting in different numbers of characters. There should be 20 emojis - they should be in the BMP (not extended char set) - and that should be it. Then, otherwise, you send SVGs. You get the added benefit of having 'whatever you want'. If there are some common rules around image sizes etc. we could be ok. SVGs are generally small thankfully. Much bigger than text, but still relatively small.

esilver 7y ago

Important to point out that the linked article, in addition to being highly-informative and well-researched is also an exemplary application of type design worthy of emulation. If you’re running a SAAS business you can admire it; if you publish a blog or editorial site by all means copy it.

pluma 7y ago
However if the entire point of your article is to talk about how emoji look, it's a terrible idea to include them verbatim when discussing a specific design. It's clear that in certain cases the article talks about a reference design or how the emojis are supposed to look. They likely checked in a browser on macOS to make sure it reads correctly, too. But good luck if you're on Windows or Android. Apparently the Microsoft mage is a wizard with a white beard. Not exactly "gender neutral".