4 ms·

Also, looking at the article, they are quite complex! It looks like handling emojis in a proper manner has a large investment and the payoff is somewhat small.

wongarsu 6y ago
Emoji don't introduce anything that isn't used for various other languages. Emojis are just the most visible breakage for American users when you screw up your unicode handling. HN however handles all of unicode just fine, it just chose to specifically exclude emojis (and a bunch of other symbols)
- MayeulC 6y ago
  I think emoji is wonderful for widespread unicode support. It combats ossification. It is also a nice carrot to incite users to install updates. However, I don't like the rabbit hole it started to go into with gendered and colored emojis. There's never going to be enough. I wish we had stuck to color-neutral and gender-neutral, like original smileys :) I find it also conveys too much meaning. I am generally not interested in knowing a person's gender or ethnic group when discussing over text... but I digress.
  - samatman 6y ago
    I've said this before, but not here: Eventually, Unicode will allow you to combine flag modifiers with human emojis. So you can have a black South Korean man facepalming. This will trigger a war which ends industrial civilization, and is the leading candidate for the Great Filter.
Someone 6y ago
For HN I would think almost all the complexity is in rendering. That’s a job for your browser. What’s left is things like the max length for a title (not too problematic to count that in code points or bytes, I think) The big risk, I think, is in users (mis)using rendering direction, multiple levels of accents, zero-width characters and weird code points to mess up the resulting page. Some Unicode symbols and emojis typically look a lot larger and heavier than ‘normal’ characters, switching writing direction may change visual indentation of a comment, etc. Worse, Unicode rendering being hard, text rendering bugs that crash browsers or even entire devices are discovered every now and then. If somebody entered one in a HN message, that could crash millions of devices.
masklinn 6y ago
Stripping some arbitrary subset of characters is a lot more work than just letting them through, which is what HN would otherwise be doing: the hard work is done by the browser, HN doesn't render emoji or lay text out.

wongarsu 6y ago

Emoji don't introduce anything that isn't used for various other languages. Emojis are just the most visible breakage for American users when you screw up your unicode handling. HN however handles all of unicode just fine, it just chose to specifically exclude emojis (and a bunch of other symbols)

MayeulC 6y ago
I think emoji is wonderful for widespread unicode support. It combats ossification. It is also a nice carrot to incite users to install updates. However, I don't like the rabbit hole it started to go into with gendered and colored emojis. There's never going to be enough. I wish we had stuck to color-neutral and gender-neutral, like original smileys :) I find it also conveys too much meaning. I am generally not interested in knowing a person's gender or ethnic group when discussing over text... but I digress.
- samatman 6y ago
  I've said this before, but not here: Eventually, Unicode will allow you to combine flag modifiers with human emojis. So you can have a black South Korean man facepalming. This will trigger a war which ends industrial civilization, and is the leading candidate for the Great Filter.

Someone 6y ago

For HN I would think almost all the complexity is in rendering. That’s a job for your browser. What’s left is things like the max length for a title (not too problematic to count that in code points or bytes, I think) The big risk, I think, is in users (mis)using rendering direction, multiple levels of accents, zero-width characters and weird code points to mess up the resulting page. Some Unicode symbols and emojis typically look a lot larger and heavier than ‘normal’ characters, switching writing direction may change visual indentation of a comment, etc. Worse, Unicode rendering being hard, text rendering bugs that crash browsers or even entire devices are discovered every now and then. If somebody entered one in a HN message, that could crash millions of devices.

masklinn 6y ago

Stripping some arbitrary subset of characters is a lot more work than just letting them through, which is what HN would otherwise be doing: the hard work is done by the browser, HN doesn't render emoji or lay text out.