4 ms·

IMO it's a huge mistake to make Unicode a repository of random clip art. Of course that ship has sailed and if there is a taco character then someone will compl

IMO it's a huge mistake to make Unicode a repository of random clip art. Of course that ship has sailed and if there is a taco character then someone will complain that there isn't a lasagna character and a broccoli chicken character, and those will be added as well, until the entire character space is full of clip art. And each person that got their favorite variety of cupcake or flavor of ice cream included or the addition of a unique character for gluten free vegan lasagna will proudly add to their resumé that they have contributed to the Unicode standard.

samatman 7y ago
Not counting the Private Use Area, there are 146,038 assigned code points. This leaves us with 830,606 to work with. Is that really such a 'huge mistake'?
- pavlov 7y ago
  IMHO the main problem is that this ever-growing mass of random clip art needs to ship on every embedded system that renders user-generated text. Text rendering has become a lot more complicated and memory-intensive. Glyphs used to be plain quadratic Bézier paths, but now there’s hundreds of full-color images — and if your drawings don’t look as pretty as Apple’s copyrighted emoji designs, someone will complain.
  - int_19h 7y ago
    The upside is that it significantly improved the adoption of Unicode in general. On desktop and mobile devices, this mostly meant more glyphs - "Unicode" fonts we had in common use in early 00s often wouldn't even have many common alphabets, much less math and science characters. I remember how some third party fonts specifically advertised full coverage of the BMP. But these days, the default system font will usually have close to full coverage. For embedded specifically, this forced Unicode into many systems that previously didn't have it, and sucked at non-ASCII (or non-Western European) text as a result. 10 years ago, I still had to use transliterated titles for my music files to get the in-dash system in my car to show them properly; not anymore. BTW, I don't think emojis have to be full-color images. On some platforms, sure. But e.g. on Win10, emojis are clearly vector images.

samatman 7y ago

Not counting the Private Use Area, there are 146,038 assigned code points. This leaves us with 830,606 to work with. Is that really such a 'huge mistake'?

pavlov 7y ago
IMHO the main problem is that this ever-growing mass of random clip art needs to ship on every embedded system that renders user-generated text. Text rendering has become a lot more complicated and memory-intensive. Glyphs used to be plain quadratic Bézier paths, but now there’s hundreds of full-color images — and if your drawings don’t look as pretty as Apple’s copyrighted emoji designs, someone will complain.
- int_19h 7y ago
  The upside is that it significantly improved the adoption of Unicode in general. On desktop and mobile devices, this mostly meant more glyphs - "Unicode" fonts we had in common use in early 00s often wouldn't even have many common alphabets, much less math and science characters. I remember how some third party fonts specifically advertised full coverage of the BMP. But these days, the default system font will usually have close to full coverage. For embedded specifically, this forced Unicode into many systems that previously didn't have it, and sucked at non-ASCII (or non-Western European) text as a result. 10 years ago, I still had to use transliterated titles for my music files to get the in-dash system in my car to show them properly; not anymore. BTW, I don't think emojis have to be full-color images. On some platforms, sure. But e.g. on Win10, emojis are clearly vector images.