4 ms·

So it's possible to modify the skin tone of emoji but impossible to disunify CJK characters? There are RTL modifiers for Arabic languages, it's impossible for C

So it's possible to modify the skin tone of emoji but impossible to disunify CJK characters? There are RTL modifiers for Arabic languages, it's impossible for CJK? It shouldn't be harder than existing unicode handling.

lifthrasiir 5y ago
Everything boils down to the interoperability and compatibility. Emoji was added because Apple and Google had to deal with (then-)Japanese emails, and skin tones were not specified. It were implementations that impose certain skin tones (that do not even match the original Japanese emojis) and as a result Unicode had to introduce a mechanism to change skin tones and mandate the default emoji without that mechanism to be neutral. RTL "modifiers" are actually formatting characters closely tied with the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm [1]. Until then texts with both RTL and LTR fragments were handled incoherently, for example legacy character sets were still struggling with logical vs. visual order issues. So they are indeed Unicode inventions, but necessary ones that do not alter existing texts. For CJK characters Unicode now provides ideographic variation selectors that select the exact glyph (or more accurately, a restricted glyphic subset of the base character). They do not disunify characters but they do provide a strong hint to display those characters in a specified way. In this way they do not cause an additional issue to existing Unicode systems (as they should already do normalization and collation in the Unicode way). The disunification by comparison would almost instantly break existing texts. [1] https://unicode.org/reports/tr9/ https://unicode.org/reports/tr9/
- account42 5y ago
  > Unicode had to introduce a mechanism to change skin tones and mandate the default emoji without that mechanism to be neutral. Adding skin tones was a choice, there was no immediate need for it.
  - musicale 5y ago
    The default seems to be yellow though, like original Lego minifigs (which I assume was one of the original plastic brick colors, and a nod to the bright yellow makeup that was popular at the time in Denmark.)
  - lifthrasiir 5y ago
    > there was no immediate need for it. You are incorrect. See the original design document [1] for skin tones and other diversity improvements, especially the "Sources of input" section. [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.p...

lifthrasiir 5y ago

Everything boils down to the interoperability and compatibility. Emoji was added because Apple and Google had to deal with (then-)Japanese emails, and skin tones were not specified. It were implementations that impose certain skin tones (that do not even match the original Japanese emojis) and as a result Unicode had to introduce a mechanism to change skin tones and mandate the default emoji without that mechanism to be neutral. RTL "modifiers" are actually formatting characters closely tied with the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm [1]. Until then texts with both RTL and LTR fragments were handled incoherently, for example legacy character sets were still struggling with logical vs. visual order issues. So they are indeed Unicode inventions, but necessary ones that do not alter existing texts. For CJK characters Unicode now provides ideographic variation selectors that select the exact glyph (or more accurately, a restricted glyphic subset of the base character). They do not disunify characters but they do provide a strong hint to display those characters in a specified way. In this way they do not cause an additional issue to existing Unicode systems (as they should already do normalization and collation in the Unicode way). The disunification by comparison would almost instantly break existing texts. [1] https://unicode.org/reports/tr9/ https://unicode.org/reports/tr9/

account42 5y ago
> Unicode had to introduce a mechanism to change skin tones and mandate the default emoji without that mechanism to be neutral. Adding skin tones was a choice, there was no immediate need for it.
- musicale 5y ago
  The default seems to be yellow though, like original Lego minifigs (which I assume was one of the original plastic brick colors, and a nod to the bright yellow makeup that was popular at the time in Denmark.)
- lifthrasiir 5y ago
  > there was no immediate need for it. You are incorrect. See the original design document [1] for skin tones and other diversity improvements, especially the "Sources of input" section. [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2014/14172r-emoji-enhancements.p...