4 ms·
The demand is far from insatiable, the linked site shows the number of new emoji per year has decreased dramatically, and most of the new ones are encoded with
by TheCoreh 3y ago
The demand is far from insatiable, the linked site shows the number of new emoji per year has decreased dramatically, and most of the new ones are encoded with ZWJ sequences that don't really require new unicode codepoints.
Also the existing system is (mostly) backwards compatible. The main issue is that it's not forwards compatible, with the exception of said ZWJ sequences.
- lapcat 3y ago> The demand is far from insatiable, the linked site shows the number of new emoji per year has decreased dramatically, and most of the new ones are encoded with ZWJ sequences that don't really require new unicode codepoints. You're comparing demand with supply, which are not the same. In any case, the blog post is somewhat misleading, because the 2023 additions produce endless varieties of human "representation", and everyone wants to be represented in emoji. And everyone wants their food to be represented in emoji. Basically, everyone wants every object in the world to be represented in emoji. It's also misleading to say that most of the new ones don't really require new unicode codepoints, because the new sequences depend on the new codepoints, otherwise they would be preexisting emoji, not 2023 additions.
- TheCoreh 3y ago> You're comparing demand with supply, which are not the same That's fair, I did get them mixed up. The _supply_ is constrained since they introduced more strict rules for adding new emoji, the demand is still much larger than that. > the 2023 additions produce endless varieties of human "representation", and everyone wants to be represented in emoji Most of the 2023 additions are about horizontally flipping actions that have directionality. Only the new family pairings could be considered representation-related, but IMO they're mostly about completing the set of possible combinations. > the new sequences depend on the new codepoints, otherwise they would be preexisting emoji, not 2023 additions It's complicated, because Unicode publishes both the codepoints and also a list of recommended interoperable ZWJ sequences. Newer additions have been to this list. Anyway, ultimately this is a matter of opinion, but arguing that unicode growing to encompass a lot of emoji as time goes by is not something scalable seems weird to me. One of the explicit goals of unicode was the ability to handle CJK ideograms. There are ~90,000 of those, and only ~3000 emoji. Even if they added 100 new emoji per year, which is far more than what they're doing, it would take about 900 years for the emoji set to match the size of the CJK ideograms set. This seems very scalable to me.