5 ms·

Emoji are “fun” but it’s got to stop. These characters are going to be used until civilization collapses, so we can’t just keep being like “lol, let’s add a foo

Emoji are “fun” but it’s got to stop. These characters are going to be used until civilization collapses, so we can’t just keep being like “lol, let’s add a food that is only eaten in some regions and has been around for less than 100 years.”

lifthrasiir 3y ago
Not different from the fact that we have useless CC0/CC1 characters somewhere in Unicode. As long as bearable (i.e. not too many), having rare characters is okay.
- masklinn 3y ago
  Emojis are also great from a technical standpoint: because they are desirable to users the unicode consortium can (and has) leverage them to encourage text rendering engines to properly implement features necessary for various languages e.g. astral codepoints, ligatures, grapheme clusters, ...
- gumby 3y ago
  They aren’t useless because they support file idempotency. Let’s say “important while almost entirely useless” and call it a day?
zoky 3y ago
But I use the khlav kalash emoji all the time!
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Displaying emoji is the job of the rendering engine, not the encoding.
  - lifthrasiir 3y ago
    Japanese telcos disagreed. (Seriously. We have emojis in Unicode because of interoperabilities with them.)
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      But they are different in every font. Only what they represent is the same. Just like other Unicode characters.
      - lifthrasiir 3y ago
        Japanese telcos eventually implemented a conversion server for emojis from other telcos (before emojis in Unicode were formally accepted). It was just a matter of time.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      We're evolving from phonetic languages back to hieroglyphic ones, because somehow the Unicode committee imagines that 1,000,000 hieroglyphs with distinct meanings are better than 26 phonetic letters.
      - lifthrasiir 3y ago
        They hate them. So much that there have been multiple attempts to curb the future Emoji growth, including one based on WikiData QIDs by the president of the Unicode consortium [1]. Emojis persist because the current growth doesn't burden the consortium or vendors too much and no better solution was found. > 26 phonetic letters And I'm genuinely offended by this particular phrase. You can't even correctly spell my name in those 26 "phonetic" letters. (My preferred convention is a mere approximation.) [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19082r-qid-emoji.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19082r-qid-emoji.pdf
        WalterBright 3y ago
        No need to be offended. I've clearly advocated Unicode16, which surely encompasses your spelling. Unicode16 is an achievable and implementable goal. I welcomed it as a great advance. I do note that you use ASCII for your handle. Could that be because few will be able to figure out how to enter the code point for your name? If your handle includes code point 0x123456, how do you expect users to deal with it?
qingcharles 3y ago
A lot of those weird emojis have been repurposed beyond their reason for inclusion in Unicode, so I won't discount them. See, e.g.: https://totallythebomb.com/stone-man-moai-emoji https://totallythebomb.com/stone-man-moai-emoji
wkat4242 3y ago
And, let's be honest. Add some of the glaring omissions in emoji. There's no need to use the eggplant emoji between lovers if you can use the real thing. I mean seriously, even the ancient Egyptians knew this: https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130B8 https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130B8 and even more explicit: https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130BA https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130BA Of course it will be inappropriate in many situations. Well, guess what, so are many words. Emoji are no longer just fun. They're also a great way for people of different languages to understand each other. No need to make things more difficult to understand and there's also a lot of non-controversial cases for this (doctor my eggplant sparks when the water tap is open is not quite as clear :) ) Of course the level of explicitness can be decided by the font designers, and the big tech companies will no doubt stylise them tastefully. The same way the gun emoji is now a green water pistol. But I really don't understand leaving this major topic of human interaction out of what is becoming a language. I'm really serious about this. Any service, website or app not wanting to support them can simply block them just like they already do certain words, and it's much easier to do than a filter on words which can be bypassed by misspelling, inserting spaces etc. This is how 'pr0n' became a word. With emoji you can't do this. I'm a bit tired of the tech sector pushing American prudeness on the whole world. Here in Barcelona you can buy waffles in the shape of penises and vulvas with strategically placed white chocolate and eat them on the street but a tastefully stylised emoji is not ok? Different cultures have different standards and Unicode was supposed to represent everyone.

lifthrasiir 3y ago

Not different from the fact that we have useless CC0/CC1 characters somewhere in Unicode. As long as bearable (i.e. not too many), having rare characters is okay.

masklinn 3y ago
Emojis are also great from a technical standpoint: because they are desirable to users the unicode consortium can (and has) leverage them to encourage text rendering engines to properly implement features necessary for various languages e.g. astral codepoints, ligatures, grapheme clusters, ...
gumby 3y ago
They aren’t useless because they support file idempotency. Let’s say “important while almost entirely useless” and call it a day?

zoky 3y ago

But I use the khlav kalash emoji all the time!

WalterBright 3y ago
Displaying emoji is the job of the rendering engine, not the encoding.
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  Japanese telcos disagreed. (Seriously. We have emojis in Unicode because of interoperabilities with them.)
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    But they are different in every font. Only what they represent is the same. Just like other Unicode characters.
    - lifthrasiir 3y ago
      Japanese telcos eventually implemented a conversion server for emojis from other telcos (before emojis in Unicode were formally accepted). It was just a matter of time.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    We're evolving from phonetic languages back to hieroglyphic ones, because somehow the Unicode committee imagines that 1,000,000 hieroglyphs with distinct meanings are better than 26 phonetic letters.
    - lifthrasiir 3y ago
      They hate them. So much that there have been multiple attempts to curb the future Emoji growth, including one based on WikiData QIDs by the president of the Unicode consortium [1]. Emojis persist because the current growth doesn't burden the consortium or vendors too much and no better solution was found. > 26 phonetic letters And I'm genuinely offended by this particular phrase. You can't even correctly spell my name in those 26 "phonetic" letters. (My preferred convention is a mere approximation.) [1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19082r-qid-emoji.pdf https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19082r-qid-emoji.pdf
      - WalterBright 3y ago
        No need to be offended. I've clearly advocated Unicode16, which surely encompasses your spelling. Unicode16 is an achievable and implementable goal. I welcomed it as a great advance. I do note that you use ASCII for your handle. Could that be because few will be able to figure out how to enter the code point for your name? If your handle includes code point 0x123456, how do you expect users to deal with it?

qingcharles 3y ago

A lot of those weird emojis have been repurposed beyond their reason for inclusion in Unicode, so I won't discount them. See, e.g.: https://totallythebomb.com/stone-man-moai-emoji https://totallythebomb.com/stone-man-moai-emoji

wkat4242 3y ago

And, let's be honest. Add some of the glaring omissions in emoji. There's no need to use the eggplant emoji between lovers if you can use the real thing. I mean seriously, even the ancient Egyptians knew this: https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130B8 https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130B8 and even more explicit: https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130BA https://unicode-explorer.com/c/130BA Of course it will be inappropriate in many situations. Well, guess what, so are many words. Emoji are no longer just fun. They're also a great way for people of different languages to understand each other. No need to make things more difficult to understand and there's also a lot of non-controversial cases for this (doctor my eggplant sparks when the water tap is open is not quite as clear :) ) Of course the level of explicitness can be decided by the font designers, and the big tech companies will no doubt stylise them tastefully. The same way the gun emoji is now a green water pistol. But I really don't understand leaving this major topic of human interaction out of what is becoming a language. I'm really serious about this. Any service, website or app not wanting to support them can simply block them just like they already do certain words, and it's much easier to do than a filter on words which can be bypassed by misspelling, inserting spaces etc. This is how 'pr0n' became a word. With emoji you can't do this. I'm a bit tired of the tech sector pushing American prudeness on the whole world. Here in Barcelona you can buy waffles in the shape of penises and vulvas with strategically placed white chocolate and eat them on the street but a tastefully stylised emoji is not ok? Different cultures have different standards and Unicode was supposed to represent everyone.