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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 unsolva

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 8y ago
Alternately: We have all this unused space with which to send characters. Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?
- sonnyblarney 8y 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.
  - earenndil 8y ago
    > It would be like adding a $500 gadget to your car that hangs out the back to go 0.01 cents better fuel mileage. Except that it doesn't cost you anything if you don't use it. > Emojis are turning into a mess - every time I grab user content these days, I have to flush for weird combinations of characters. Why? This I don't understand. You have user content, it has emoji—so what? How does that affect your ability to process it as-is?

earenndil 8y ago

Alternately: We have all this unused space with which to send characters. Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?

sonnyblarney 8y 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.
- earenndil 8y ago
  > It would be like adding a $500 gadget to your car that hangs out the back to go 0.01 cents better fuel mileage. Except that it doesn't cost you anything if you don't use it. > Emojis are turning into a mess - every time I grab user content these days, I have to flush for weird combinations of characters. Why? This I don't understand. You have user content, it has emoji—so what? How does that affect your ability to process it as-is?