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It's great as a global character set and really enabled the world to move ahead at just the right time when the web started to connect us all together. But the

It's great as a global character set and really enabled the world to move ahead at just the right time when the web started to connect us all together. But the whole emoji modifier (e.g. guy + heart + lips + girl = one kissing couple character) thing is a disaster. Too many rules made up on the fly that make building an accurate parser a nightmare. It should have either specified this strictly and consistently as part of the standard, or just left it out for a future standard to implement, and just just used separate codepoints for the combinations that were really necessary. This complexity is also something that has led to multiple vulnerabilities especially on mobiles. See here all the combos: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-modifiers.html https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-modifiers.html

zerocrates 5y ago
Whatever you may think of emoji and all the attendant baggage that comes with them doesn't really have any bearing on how great UTF-8 is.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  I have nothing against emoji. Just the combination mechanism. And yeah this problem only came later after UTF-8 was already invented. It's a smart solution also because at the time a lot of detractors of Unicode were opposed to the extra data requirements of the long form representations.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    The combination mechanism is a core part of Unicode, not just a thing added to make emoji work.
WorldMaker 5y ago
Emoji are not any more complex than some natural languages that people need to encode in Unicode. It's a weird, more modern "language" than most, but it's a still a human language with human quirks. It's a lovely privilege that English speakers generally don't have any language encoding problems to deal with beyond Emoji, but it's a brilliant bit of Unicode today that Emoji is becoming a required by users common denominator that stress tests incorrect assumptions English speakers want to make about language encoding.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  Putting emoji in the test suite was a favorite way to force projects to upgrade to Python 3.
bmn__ 5y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27537294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27537294

zerocrates 5y ago

Whatever you may think of emoji and all the attendant baggage that comes with them doesn't really have any bearing on how great UTF-8 is.

GekkePrutser 5y ago
I have nothing against emoji. Just the combination mechanism. And yeah this problem only came later after UTF-8 was already invented. It's a smart solution also because at the time a lot of detractors of Unicode were opposed to the extra data requirements of the long form representations.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  The combination mechanism is a core part of Unicode, not just a thing added to make emoji work.

WorldMaker 5y ago

Emoji are not any more complex than some natural languages that people need to encode in Unicode. It's a weird, more modern "language" than most, but it's a still a human language with human quirks. It's a lovely privilege that English speakers generally don't have any language encoding problems to deal with beyond Emoji, but it's a brilliant bit of Unicode today that Emoji is becoming a required by users common denominator that stress tests incorrect assumptions English speakers want to make about language encoding.

BeFlatXIII 5y ago
Putting emoji in the test suite was a favorite way to force projects to upgrade to Python 3.

bmn__ 5y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27537294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27537294