5 ms·

Unicode needed to include written-on-paper glyphs that existed in the world. That makes sense to most people. But a lot, lot, lot of communication these days ha

Unicode needed to include written-on-paper glyphs that existed in the world. That makes sense to most people. But a lot, lot, lot of communication these days happen digitally (digital first). You can't scribble things as freely in a textbox like this one. You can certainly make suggestive combinations like `:)`, but you are pretty limited. (How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis?) How do you propose that Unicode include glyph innovations that are digital-first?

JellyYelly 3y ago
> How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis? How often do people need to do that; with that level of fidelity, right down to the composition of the family? My suspicion is not often. A short sentence does this description just as good and is much less ambiguous, as in written, concise communication that is "emoji-rich" is filled with so many details (such as the composition of the family and their skintone) it's often not clear which details are important for the message and which are not. In addition because emojis are rendered differently on different devices the meaning may be lost (e.g. when apple changed the gun emoji to a watergun, many messages took on different meanings depending on if a revolver was used or a watergun)
- chii 3y ago
  > A short sentence does this description just as good and is much less ambiguous so you're now dictating what can be said, rather than designing a system for which _anything_ that could be said is possible? You're missing the goal of a system of writing and representation.
  - 0xBA5ED 3y ago
    The system exists. It's text.
    - chii 3y ago
      how would you write something that's not ascii character based, such as hieroglyphs?
      - 0xBA5ED 3y ago
        A set of hieroglyphs for a formally designed and recognized language that is in use to communicate is one thing. Endless bits of arbitrary clip art is another.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  > How often do people need to do that; Surprisingly, this happens. I recently started to use a lot of emojis, including ones like these, to name calendar events - because I use a watch face on my smartwatch that renders the next 12 hours worth of events on the clock face, and given the small space, many of the events can fit three or four letters of description. Emojis work as great workaround, because I can encode things like "takeoff, gate A11" in 4 visual characters, or "doctor's visit" in one. (I prefix the event titles with emojis rather than replace the longer form completely, because some of those events are shared, and sometimes I forget what an emoji stands for anyway...) Now, this is perhaps an unique use case, but I found myself doing this in other scenarios too, like task planners - the common thread is, "not enough space to fit full label".
pavlov 3y ago
Are they glyphs or just vector graphics clip art? Unicode doesn’t include ligature code points for every English word either. Somehow we manage to keep glyphs and words separate. Why couldn’t we do the same for inline graphics? The copyright situation around emoji is actually worse now than if they’d been kept out of the standard. People expect emojis to look like on iPhone, but those specific graphics are owned by Apple, leaving everybody else scrambling for emojis that look close enough without infringing. If emojis had originally been released as an open source library of SVG graphics together with some kind of standard shorthand way to refer to them without embedding an entire inline URL, we could have truly open clip art instead of this weird semi-proprietary mess.
- amelius 3y ago
  In my ideal world, people would have a standard library of SVG emoji on their phones, they can send them around, but they can also save the emojis others use to their own library. Of course, artists can add new SVG emoji and send them around. This way, we get an evolving library of emoji, just like how languages evolve. Unicode is stiffling this evolution.
  - biztos 3y ago
    Interestingly (but commercially) the very popular Line app, which IMO has the best "stickers," lets you do something like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software) If I buy a set of stickers (little animations, much more expressive than emojis) I can send them to anyone in chats, or I can send the set as a gift to that user; in the latter case, the user can add them to their library. Your library is the standard stickers, any free stickers you've added, anything you've bought, and anything you've been gifted. The end result is that some people have a fairly distinct sticker-communication style because they have in their library relatively obscure ones, or just like to use the less-popular free ones. In theory anyone can make their own stickers but it's kind of a pain, and I haven't gotten around to it: https://creator.line.me/en/stickermaker/ https://creator.line.me/en/stickermaker/ So in my ideal world, we'd not have any emojis that can't be reduced to expressive ASCII, but we'd have a massive public library of freely available SVG Stickers with accessibility features, and all the chat apps would use them.
zokier 3y ago
> How do you propose that Unicode include glyph innovations that are digital-first? Why does Unicode specifically need to include novel "innovations"? It's arguably failure of the community that we have not been able to standardize interoperable higher level rich text formats, so now everything and kitchen sink needs to be bolted on Unicode instead in the name of interop.
- Sesse__ 3y ago
  > Why does Unicode specifically need to include novel "innovations"? Unicode chose to get into emoji because Japanese carriers were already making their own private character sets with emoji, and Unicode has a goal of being a superset of all other (relevant) character sets. (Arguably emoji support in Unicode has been a resounding success. Look at the world-wide enthusiasm around each new Unicode version that gets announced now!)
  - ygra 3y ago
    It also brought broken handling of code points beyond the BMP to the forefront and dealing with Unicode text is correct in much more places by now. Previously the only people who noticed were those who needed obscure Han ideagraphs, hieroglyphs, and other things that are not terribly useful or interesting to the vast majority of people.
ilyt 3y ago
> (How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis?) Why you need to? We dealt without hieroglyphs just fine in communication.
- Closi 3y ago
  The tahitans can deal with communication just fine with only 13 letters, so I guess we could probably trim the letters b, c, d and g out of unicode too. With enough optimisation we might just be able to communicate with just a boolean-based language. (i.e. why limit written communication rather than make it richer)
  - zamadatix 3y ago
    That you can take something too far in one direction doesn't give reason or explanation for anything except "don't take it too far in that direction". There are probably good explanations why not to take things infinitely far in either direction but they don't really help explain where the line should be drawn. I think the actual argument here is encoding of seemingly arbitrary colored pictorial combinations overcomplicates character encoding. If you want to display a colored drawing of an arbitrary family SVG is already a thing but if you want to textually encode an arbitrary family you should use characters in your language not expect the text encoding to pick up more arbitrary drawings. To me, using Emoji was probably a great way to force developer's hands on supporting certain encoding features more complicated languages use even in cases they only wanted to support latin text. That said, this job is already done. We don't need to continue putting everything into ever more complex pictorial encodings via Unicode for the rest of time.
    - Closi 3y ago
      That’s true, but if your argument can be extended to absurdity it probably can't be used to justify where the 'correct' place on the scale is to land.
    - avgcorrection 3y ago
      > That you can take something too far in one direction doesn't give reason or explanation for anything except "don't take it too far in that direction". Why or how does the Tahitian language take things too far?
phito 3y ago
> How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis You don't. You use text.
- ungamedplayer 3y ago
  I still was trying to figure out how an emoji represents a family.
  - aendruk 3y ago
    With the scheme demonstrated at the beginning of the article. 1F468 man 200D zero width joiner 1F469 woman 200D zero width joiner 1F467 girl
    - worthless-trash 3y ago
      Thats just three people close together, could be a Torball team.
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    You use the pregnant man emoji, which represents mother, father and child together as one.
tambourine_man 3y ago
You write them down. With letters and words. See, we invented this thing called the alphabet. You memorize some 20 symbols and combine them to express every possible emotion, instead of memorizing a gazillion symbols. It’s no wonder hieroglyphs have fallen out of favour in the last 5k years.
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  Thank you for your contribution. :)
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
I don't speak good emoji though; I understand the smiley face, but what does posting the family emojis mean? What is it used for? Nobody I know or have seen online replaces random words with emoji for brevity. That's annoying. At worst I've seen ironic posts or trying to be hip outlets adding the emoji for a word after the word itself, or use them as bullet point markers. It reminds me of a thing where it was like, "elephants are so smart because they can use this trumpet to communicate danger", and someone pointed out that humans can do that too by using words. Mind blown.
perryizgr8 3y ago
> How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis? Using nifty little things called jpegs.
- Timon3 3y ago
  How do you propose they get transmitted? In-band in the middle of text (good luck reading that with an unsupported editor), or through servers, necessitating NAT and all that good fun? Since the images can be arbitrary you also open yourself up to bugs in the parser. All around a much, much worse idea compared to text emojis.
  - perryizgr8 3y ago
    > good luck reading that with an unsupported editor You need a "supported editor" to display Unicode emojis too, as TFA shows. And supposedly it is quite hard. OTOH displaying jpegs is a solved problem.
    - Timon3 3y ago
      > You need a "supported editor" to display Unicode emojis too, as TFA shows. Let's give this a try. This is roughly what a sentence with an emoji looks like in an unsupported editor: hello [] world (with [] being the well-known "placeholder" square). Now let's try the same with an emoji, I went with 16x16 to make this kind of bearable, but realistically you'd want at least 64x64: hello data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEASABIAAD/2wBDAAEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQH/2wBDAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQH/wAARCAAQABADAREAAhEBAxEB/8QAFwAAAwEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIICv/EABwQAAIDAQEBAQAAAAAAAAAAAAQFAgMGBwEIFP/EABoBAAEFAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACAwUGCAn/xAAhEQACAwEBAAICAwAAAAAAAAADBAECBQYHCBITFAAVFv/aAAwDAQACEQMRAD8A1xbv6+xizYBjaeOtvSMunT5XmVeTDaMAP1waXJyNft7FFlPoub9OHjK5gylJQmBICnfTMgi+6PJ31n5YubHpnY4S5H1eV89d3MumSj0TmCPdLhNmR0dDQNmtpM65HTrHjKxrGlSiY4JdczZL3ppUPljuLz2OdUaRNLYxkt119xdcp1qvKjcXzcyGqFquRYJq1YKGsNMNQSsFqCg6SYX6+xjPYGDZivWjpVnTYcr06vWBtFy/0qbSlPRsMTNtbb6VnPDSJSoYrfYqHIQxsqKIkUUX+nlHyybyPS+OwjkeZ5b0F3DzL5LvQubwsMu44FFB/PNotus45UjtB/tMehoUIpeb1XC0OhJDeWu7XPa5mqJD0cjGd3En011xHZ/RVK4fN04VGKpyMADaoSHiWlmfxRJLAuQf8hP6/wCB/SXGOkaDZ8hzrbo/P9m4cPaglrLqYUMzY1bMHRKs2rm7sSauQJTQgcNqyXkL2CyC+uZwRYNw5E5634bPnnYdjtF8WzPYuM7vo9DrQPL4mrodHyWlpkufUyT2wzhfpi2Nf9hMn1MvWZvFq0Na/wBrpyHYZHoGDgotdn/juj5vJTwzpuuZS+duLJCoBTRWtrhuuV2wxxRoNCCNF5mYggvrML8fcA+kuydHRbPryFxz3BZFumdXAs2PUzB9D4qbrnlCoCrpLwyxrewKVjCmN1q8ZetVTY0wNNKYVD0NeTeF39G7Pjdsfi+Z45xXBdCj1bDh8TUz+i67TziiPl5Qp3DnfJjjMKTtkn8K8zMfWtzVH9V9h2GN59z+8ir2Udl0nSZTeKuok7lsZ+Eu2Ei7WgxbICNcLlRkmq4bXIebxWZgYvvaf//Z world Now, which one is more readable?
GuB-42 3y ago
> Unicode needed to include written-on-paper glyphs that existed in the world. If it was the case, Emoji is seriously lacking a penis. I mean, seriously, give men a way to draw and this is what you will get. There are already existing "subjective combinations" like 8===D and the eggplant emoji for which it is its most common use. There is a proper penis in the hieroglyphics, but just because there is a hieroglyphic doesn't mean there is no corresponding emoji (ex: eye). On the other hand, many emoji pass even though I have never seen anything remotely similar being scribbled ever, it is the addition to the emoji block that drove its use. Plus, because inclusivity, all its equivalents in different genders, skin tones, cultures, etc... Clearly, Unicode acts as an arbiter here. It decides on what it thinks it is "good" rather than what is really in use. And it is not just about penises, the hangman is also absent, as is the "gun pointed on head" sign (suggesting suicide) that is commonly used in real life. Worth noting that the first emoji were included because they were already in common use before Unicode, in Japanese phones specifically. Unicode just included them so that Japanese users could switch to Unicode without loss of functionality.
- cnity 3y ago
  Unicode actually does include a penis: 𓂸 There is even a "phallus with emission" variant.
  - noAnswer 3y ago
    Interesting: U+130BA EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D053 (phallus with liquid issuing from it) 𓂺 Not even BabelMap or BabelPad have a font showing more than a square.
    - GuB-42 3y ago
      I just discovered that the default Windows 10 font censors phalluses except when they are next to another hieroglyph. 𓂲𓂺
khiqxj 3y ago
[dead]
terracottalite 3y ago
I think the emoji combining isn't that useful, at least in the family example. It is enough putting them side by side without merging them. That way you have even more possible combinations, like a family of an ogre and a human and a kid. Sorry if this doesn't make sense.

JellyYelly 3y ago

> How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis? How often do people need to do that; with that level of fidelity, right down to the composition of the family? My suspicion is not often. A short sentence does this description just as good and is much less ambiguous, as in written, concise communication that is "emoji-rich" is filled with so many details (such as the composition of the family and their skintone) it's often not clear which details are important for the message and which are not. In addition because emojis are rendered differently on different devices the meaning may be lost (e.g. when apple changed the gun emoji to a watergun, many messages took on different meanings depending on if a revolver was used or a watergun)

chii 3y ago
> A short sentence does this description just as good and is much less ambiguous so you're now dictating what can be said, rather than designing a system for which _anything_ that could be said is possible? You're missing the goal of a system of writing and representation.
- 0xBA5ED 3y ago
  The system exists. It's text.
  - chii 3y ago
    how would you write something that's not ascii character based, such as hieroglyphs?
    - 0xBA5ED 3y ago
      A set of hieroglyphs for a formally designed and recognized language that is in use to communicate is one thing. Endless bits of arbitrary clip art is another.
TeMPOraL 3y ago
> How often do people need to do that; Surprisingly, this happens. I recently started to use a lot of emojis, including ones like these, to name calendar events - because I use a watch face on my smartwatch that renders the next 12 hours worth of events on the clock face, and given the small space, many of the events can fit three or four letters of description. Emojis work as great workaround, because I can encode things like "takeoff, gate A11" in 4 visual characters, or "doctor's visit" in one. (I prefix the event titles with emojis rather than replace the longer form completely, because some of those events are shared, and sometimes I forget what an emoji stands for anyway...) Now, this is perhaps an unique use case, but I found myself doing this in other scenarios too, like task planners - the common thread is, "not enough space to fit full label".

pavlov 3y ago

Are they glyphs or just vector graphics clip art? Unicode doesn’t include ligature code points for every English word either. Somehow we manage to keep glyphs and words separate. Why couldn’t we do the same for inline graphics? The copyright situation around emoji is actually worse now than if they’d been kept out of the standard. People expect emojis to look like on iPhone, but those specific graphics are owned by Apple, leaving everybody else scrambling for emojis that look close enough without infringing. If emojis had originally been released as an open source library of SVG graphics together with some kind of standard shorthand way to refer to them without embedding an entire inline URL, we could have truly open clip art instead of this weird semi-proprietary mess.

amelius 3y ago
In my ideal world, people would have a standard library of SVG emoji on their phones, they can send them around, but they can also save the emojis others use to their own library. Of course, artists can add new SVG emoji and send them around. This way, we get an evolving library of emoji, just like how languages evolve. Unicode is stiffling this evolution.
- biztos 3y ago
  Interestingly (but commercially) the very popular Line app, which IMO has the best "stickers," lets you do something like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software) If I buy a set of stickers (little animations, much more expressive than emojis) I can send them to anyone in chats, or I can send the set as a gift to that user; in the latter case, the user can add them to their library. Your library is the standard stickers, any free stickers you've added, anything you've bought, and anything you've been gifted. The end result is that some people have a fairly distinct sticker-communication style because they have in their library relatively obscure ones, or just like to use the less-popular free ones. In theory anyone can make their own stickers but it's kind of a pain, and I haven't gotten around to it: https://creator.line.me/en/stickermaker/ https://creator.line.me/en/stickermaker/ So in my ideal world, we'd not have any emojis that can't be reduced to expressive ASCII, but we'd have a massive public library of freely available SVG Stickers with accessibility features, and all the chat apps would use them.

zokier 3y ago

> How do you propose that Unicode include glyph innovations that are digital-first? Why does Unicode specifically need to include novel "innovations"? It's arguably failure of the community that we have not been able to standardize interoperable higher level rich text formats, so now everything and kitchen sink needs to be bolted on Unicode instead in the name of interop.

Sesse__ 3y ago
> Why does Unicode specifically need to include novel "innovations"? Unicode chose to get into emoji because Japanese carriers were already making their own private character sets with emoji, and Unicode has a goal of being a superset of all other (relevant) character sets. (Arguably emoji support in Unicode has been a resounding success. Look at the world-wide enthusiasm around each new Unicode version that gets announced now!)
- ygra 3y ago
  It also brought broken handling of code points beyond the BMP to the forefront and dealing with Unicode text is correct in much more places by now. Previously the only people who noticed were those who needed obscure Han ideagraphs, hieroglyphs, and other things that are not terribly useful or interesting to the vast majority of people.

ilyt 3y ago

> (How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis?) Why you need to? We dealt without hieroglyphs just fine in communication.

Closi 3y ago
The tahitans can deal with communication just fine with only 13 letters, so I guess we could probably trim the letters b, c, d and g out of unicode too. With enough optimisation we might just be able to communicate with just a boolean-based language. (i.e. why limit written communication rather than make it richer)
- zamadatix 3y ago
  That you can take something too far in one direction doesn't give reason or explanation for anything except "don't take it too far in that direction". There are probably good explanations why not to take things infinitely far in either direction but they don't really help explain where the line should be drawn. I think the actual argument here is encoding of seemingly arbitrary colored pictorial combinations overcomplicates character encoding. If you want to display a colored drawing of an arbitrary family SVG is already a thing but if you want to textually encode an arbitrary family you should use characters in your language not expect the text encoding to pick up more arbitrary drawings. To me, using Emoji was probably a great way to force developer's hands on supporting certain encoding features more complicated languages use even in cases they only wanted to support latin text. That said, this job is already done. We don't need to continue putting everything into ever more complex pictorial encodings via Unicode for the rest of time.
  - Closi 3y ago
    That’s true, but if your argument can be extended to absurdity it probably can't be used to justify where the 'correct' place on the scale is to land.
  - avgcorrection 3y ago
    > That you can take something too far in one direction doesn't give reason or explanation for anything except "don't take it too far in that direction". Why or how does the Tahitian language take things too far?

phito 3y ago

> How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis You don't. You use text.

ungamedplayer 3y ago
I still was trying to figure out how an emoji represents a family.
- aendruk 3y ago
  With the scheme demonstrated at the beginning of the article. 1F468 man 200D zero width joiner 1F469 woman 200D zero width joiner 1F467 girl
  - worthless-trash 3y ago
    Thats just three people close together, could be a Torball team.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  You use the pregnant man emoji, which represents mother, father and child together as one.

tambourine_man 3y ago

You write them down. With letters and words. See, we invented this thing called the alphabet. You memorize some 20 symbols and combine them to express every possible emotion, instead of memorizing a gazillion symbols. It’s no wonder hieroglyphs have fallen out of favour in the last 5k years.

avgcorrection 3y ago
Thank you for your contribution. :)

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

I don't speak good emoji though; I understand the smiley face, but what does posting the family emojis mean? What is it used for? Nobody I know or have seen online replaces random words with emoji for brevity. That's annoying. At worst I've seen ironic posts or trying to be hip outlets adding the emoji for a word after the word itself, or use them as bullet point markers. It reminds me of a thing where it was like, "elephants are so smart because they can use this trumpet to communicate danger", and someone pointed out that humans can do that too by using words. Mind blown.

perryizgr8 3y ago

> How do you scribble "family of three: mom, father, daughter" without any emojis? Using nifty little things called jpegs.

Timon3 3y ago
How do you propose they get transmitted? In-band in the middle of text (good luck reading that with an unsupported editor), or through servers, necessitating NAT and all that good fun? Since the images can be arbitrary you also open yourself up to bugs in the parser. All around a much, much worse idea compared to text emojis.
- perryizgr8 3y ago
  > good luck reading that with an unsupported editor You need a "supported editor" to display Unicode emojis too, as TFA shows. And supposedly it is quite hard. OTOH displaying jpegs is a solved problem.
  - Timon3 3y ago
    > You need a "supported editor" to display Unicode emojis too, as TFA shows. Let's give this a try. This is roughly what a sentence with an emoji looks like in an unsupported editor: hello [] world (with [] being the well-known "placeholder" square). Now let's try the same with an emoji, I went with 16x16 to make this kind of bearable, but realistically you'd want at least 64x64: hello data:image/jpeg;base64,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 world Now, which one is more readable?

GuB-42 3y ago

> Unicode needed to include written-on-paper glyphs that existed in the world. If it was the case, Emoji is seriously lacking a penis. I mean, seriously, give men a way to draw and this is what you will get. There are already existing "subjective combinations" like 8===D and the eggplant emoji for which it is its most common use. There is a proper penis in the hieroglyphics, but just because there is a hieroglyphic doesn't mean there is no corresponding emoji (ex: eye). On the other hand, many emoji pass even though I have never seen anything remotely similar being scribbled ever, it is the addition to the emoji block that drove its use. Plus, because inclusivity, all its equivalents in different genders, skin tones, cultures, etc... Clearly, Unicode acts as an arbiter here. It decides on what it thinks it is "good" rather than what is really in use. And it is not just about penises, the hangman is also absent, as is the "gun pointed on head" sign (suggesting suicide) that is commonly used in real life. Worth noting that the first emoji were included because they were already in common use before Unicode, in Japanese phones specifically. Unicode just included them so that Japanese users could switch to Unicode without loss of functionality.

cnity 3y ago
Unicode actually does include a penis: 𓂸 There is even a "phallus with emission" variant.
- noAnswer 3y ago
  Interesting: U+130BA EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPH D053 (phallus with liquid issuing from it) 𓂺 Not even BabelMap or BabelPad have a font showing more than a square.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    I just discovered that the default Windows 10 font censors phalluses except when they are next to another hieroglyph. 𓂲𓂺

khiqxj 3y ago

[dead]

terracottalite 3y ago

I think the emoji combining isn't that useful, at least in the family example. It is enough putting them side by side without merging them. That way you have even more possible combinations, like a family of an ogre and a human and a kid. Sorry if this doesn't make sense.