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Why couldn’t they do HANDSHAKE + ZWJ + SKIN TONE + ZWJ + SKIN TONE? I don’t understand why a new emoji is necessary — the author alluded to “making sense withou
by vgel 5y ago
Why couldn’t they do HANDSHAKE + ZWJ + SKIN TONE + ZWJ + SKIN TONE? I don’t understand why a new emoji is necessary — the author alluded to “making sense without an OS update” but without an OS update the new emojis won’t render at all, whereas this solution would at least kinda make sense (it would be a yellow handshake followed by two skin color blocks, I believe, just like on devices that don’t support skin tone modifiers for other emojis)
- Tistron 5y agoI thought so too first, but I think that would be a quite difficult solution. Skin tone is supposed to only come after some specific code points. We don't want all the grapheme splitting algorithms to break, and it would really change the meaning of zwj fundamentally.
- ghayes 5y agoI’m a bit confused; the article alludes to the fact that the handshake emoji doesn’t include skin tones at all, then solves for adding two different tones. Is there a reason we don’t just have [handshake]+[single skin tone]?
- mft_ 5y agoTo allow two different skin tones to shake hands?
- TeMPOraL 5y agoLike 'mft_ said, two tones are because there are two hands shaking, possibly differently-colored ones. And per 'Tistron, Handshake doesn't support skin tones and retrofitting them could break things. So the best solution seems to be to reuse two characters that support skin tones - hands. And with directionality, they pretty much already express the concept on their own (the mentioned "fallback").
- StavrosK 5y agoRename the emoji to "person with two right hands clasping them" and you're done!
- vgel 5y agoAh, I didn't realize skin tone was specified to only appear after certain emojis -- that seems rather limiting to forwards compatibility to me, but I'm sure there's a good reason for it.