4 ms·

These emoticons should never have been a part of Unicode in the first place. Second big mistake of that org after the Unihan fiasco.

by ceeam 3y ago

themerone 3y ago
Emoji's are a fun way to illustrate a problem that happens with languages too.
dchest 3y ago
If not for emoji, lots of software wouldn't care about correctly processing strings in other languages, so it's good that we have them.
- hnfong 3y ago
  This. I've been quite happy that popular emojis were introduced in supplementary planes, because my language has quite a few common words (eg. 𨋢 [lift/escalator]) that ended up on plane 2. Proper software support for those characters used to be terrible, but things got much better after emojis became popular. So, thanks and sorry everyone :)
Findecanor 3y ago
I agree that they introduced unnecessary complexity for text encoding, and for font-rendering (which are expected to support multi-coloured emoticons now). I once started writing on a text editor, and then fell deep into Unicode handling. I have now spent more work on the Unicode parts than on anything else in the program. I think that the industry could have instead adopted the old web-forum convention of colon-word-encoding, originating from ASCII art. Example: ":facepalm:". When the sequence is not supported as an emoji, it degrades gracefully into text that can be understood by anyone reading it instead of into a sequence of empty squares or diamonds with question marks in them. Text also provides a more efficient input method than having to browse for an icon in a list.
- kps 3y ago
  Naturally Unicode did the equivalent of colon-encoding too, for flags.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  I’m glad that Unicode caters more to users than to people who start on writing text editors.
lopis 3y ago
They were added to Unicode because they were already part of other encodings, and then were expanded. Makes total sense to add them.
kps 3y ago
Unification was reasonable at the time, given the goal to fit Unicode in 16 bits, and willingness to exclude obsolete characters. It's just that they followed official Japanese standards, and therefore unified too many from the point of view of other languages. I think the first big mistake was using postfix/infix operators (combining characters, modifiers, variant selectors, joiners, etc.) rather than prefix, preferably in blocks by arity. That would have simplified processing (in particular a keyboard dead key could have been identical to a combining character) and made broken sequences detectable. The latest big mistake, I think, was retroactively changing some non-emoji characters to have “emoji presentation”, which means that some text has to be edited to preserve its original appearance.
- hnfong 3y ago
  > It's just that they followed official Japanese standards, and therefore unified too many from the point of view of other languages. And they're still complaining about the handful of cases that were missed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022906 ---- Another mistake IMHO was that they accepted too many "dictionary characters", i.e. the ones only seen once or twice in some obscure dictionary -- they often had explanations like "an obscure form of [common character]".

These emoticons should never have been a part of Unicode in the first place. Second big mistake of that org after the Unihan fiasco.

by ceeam 3y ago

These emoticons should never have been a part of Unicode in the first place. Second big mistake of that org after the Unihan fiasco.

themerone 3y ago

Emoji's are a fun way to illustrate a problem that happens with languages too.

dchest 3y ago

If not for emoji, lots of software wouldn't care about correctly processing strings in other languages, so it's good that we have them.

hnfong 3y ago
This. I've been quite happy that popular emojis were introduced in supplementary planes, because my language has quite a few common words (eg. 𨋢 [lift/escalator]) that ended up on plane 2. Proper software support for those characters used to be terrible, but things got much better after emojis became popular. So, thanks and sorry everyone :)

Findecanor 3y ago

I agree that they introduced unnecessary complexity for text encoding, and for font-rendering (which are expected to support multi-coloured emoticons now). I once started writing on a text editor, and then fell deep into Unicode handling. I have now spent more work on the Unicode parts than on anything else in the program. I think that the industry could have instead adopted the old web-forum convention of colon-word-encoding, originating from ASCII art. Example: ":facepalm:". When the sequence is not supported as an emoji, it degrades gracefully into text that can be understood by anyone reading it instead of into a sequence of empty squares or diamonds with question marks in them. Text also provides a more efficient input method than having to browse for an icon in a list.

kps 3y ago
Naturally Unicode did the equivalent of colon-encoding too, for flags.
avgcorrection 3y ago
I’m glad that Unicode caters more to users than to people who start on writing text editors.

lopis 3y ago

They were added to Unicode because they were already part of other encodings, and then were expanded. Makes total sense to add them.

kps 3y ago

Unification was reasonable at the time, given the goal to fit Unicode in 16 bits, and willingness to exclude obsolete characters. It's just that they followed official Japanese standards, and therefore unified too many from the point of view of other languages. I think the first big mistake was using postfix/infix operators (combining characters, modifiers, variant selectors, joiners, etc.) rather than prefix, preferably in blocks by arity. That would have simplified processing (in particular a keyboard dead key could have been identical to a combining character) and made broken sequences detectable. The latest big mistake, I think, was retroactively changing some non-emoji characters to have “emoji presentation”, which means that some text has to be edited to preserve its original appearance.

hnfong 3y ago
> It's just that they followed official Japanese standards, and therefore unified too many from the point of view of other languages. And they're still complaining about the handful of cases that were missed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022906 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29022906 ---- Another mistake IMHO was that they accepted too many "dictionary characters", i.e. the ones only seen once or twice in some obscure dictionary -- they often had explanations like "an obscure form of [common character]".