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RE point 4, I believe that this was initially a descriptivist rather than prescriptivist step. People were using emoticons, showing that emoji might be desirab
by grlass 5y ago
RE point 4, I believe that this was initially a descriptivist rather than prescriptivist step.
People were using emoticons, showing that emoji might be desirable. Some cell phone manufacturers/carriers added their own emoji [1]. They were very popular. Unicode added emoji to the standard, since lots of people were using it.
Not adding emoji would have been _more_ prescriptivist, and since it was desired anyway would have just caused fragmentation.
[1] https://blog.emojipedia.org/correcting-the-record-on-the-first-emoji-set/ https://blog.emojipedia.org/correcting-the-record-on-the-fir...
- WalterBright 5y agoEmoticons are simply interpreting :-) as a smiley face, no Unicode invention is necessary.
- grlass 5y agoYes, and emoji came from emoticons, meeting a need to express more complex ideas. Unicode adopted emoji after they were popularised.
- WalterBright 5y ago> meeting a need to express more complex ideas Still not necessary to have special Unicode code points for them. :poop: should do just fine. No need for more than that.
- pests 5y ago:poop: was never made into stuffed animals or pillows either. Branding and imagry means something to some people despite not to you.
- WalterBright 5y agoWhat does branding have to do with Unicode? Is there a Unicode code point for the coca-cola trademark or the Amazon smile?
- coldacid 5y agoProbably by Unicode 16 there will be. :p
- grlass 5y agoNot in the Unicode guidelines as they currently stand ':). They are very explicit that this is not permitted [1]. Also, RE :poop: 1. Huffman encoding philosophy - encode frequently used symbols using fewer bytes. 2. Standards are helpful, :poop: is very English-centric, whereas U+1F4A9 is much more interpretable. [1] https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Selection_Factors_Inappropriate https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Selection_Factors_I...
- coldacid 5y ago>Not in the Unicode guidelines as they currently stand ':). I know, I'm just being humorously facetious. (Or at least I'd like to think that I am.)
- dkdbejwi383 5y agoWhat about this one: :couple-with-heart-woman-man-light-skin-tone-medium-light-skin-tone:
- WalterBright 5y agoNothing wrong with that. The renderer can do what it likes with that. The thing is, once you open the door to every-picture-must-have-a-unique-code-point, where do you stop? How many trillions of code points are needed? Hey, Unicode should take the next logical step, and allow embedded Javascript! What could possibly go wrong with that?
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoHey, it degrades gracefully when displayed on a system that doesn't support that glyph. Sounds like a nice feature to me.
- WalterBright 5y agoDid you know that eons ago, people would draw a picture of a bull to mean a bull? Then they got lazy, and would just draw the head? Then they decided to just have the bull's head represent the first sound of their word for bull. Then they simplified the bull's head to 3 straight lines (people get lazy). Then for some reason decided it was easier to write if they rotated it 180 degrees. A Yup. A bull's head. But now that's no good anymore, and we're back to a picture of a bull, and need about a million more pictures to flesh out our new and improved alphabet. (There are a million words in the English language.)
- jhanschoo 5y agoConsidering the explosion in emoji alongside photo and video now that it's more accessible to the masses, one suspects that most people prize being able to communicate in more ways that might be informationally inefficient, as opposed to what you seem to prize more in being able communicate through text alone.
- WalterBright 5y agoTo embed pictures and video, we have HTML. No need to put it in Unicode.