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Clip art is dead, long live clip art! Unicode started with the mission to encode all characters needed for written communication in the world. This was alread

Clip art is dead, long live clip art! Unicode started with the mission to encode all characters needed for written communication in the world. This was already broad, but was not unusual for its time. Unlike Wikipedia, Unicode never went through a battle between inclusionists and deletionists. Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine). Instead it ended up as a fancy clip art library that every software somehow has to support, but with no way to implement the standard in its entirety.

lifthrasiir 1y ago
Emoji can be seen as a bait for implementations to support under-represented or ancient scripts as a side effect. In fact, emoji worked so well that we now have a universal full non-BMP support everywhere. For example, MySQL used to have the cursed BMP-only utf8 charset aka utf8mb3! It lasted until everyone started to complain about emojis.
jan_Inkepa 1y ago
>Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine). Why do you say that? Because Unicode now has become balkanised between various CJK regions?
- weinzierl 1y ago
  Because it conflates distinct characters and therefore fails its original mission to encode all characters needed for written communication. Han Unification is just the most obvious case but the issues do not stop there. I'll give you a western example. In the sentence «Günther a souligné l’ambigüité de son discours.» there is an umlaut and a dieresis. They are different things with different function. In traditional book printing they used to look differently. With Unicode all this cultural nuance is lost. The characters necessary to communicate precisely simply have never been encoded, because Unicode forgot about its core mission. Fixing things like that is where I want to see efforts go.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
arp242 1y ago
Unicode still does lots of work on language support. The notion that emoji support impedes that is simply not true. And people were already doing emojis with phpBB, MSN Messenger, etc. The alternative to Unicode emojis would not be "no emojis", but "every platform with their own proprietary incompatible implementation". Han Unification has been discussed a million times already. Originally Unicode only had 2 bytes and 65k characters. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not – I don't speak these languages and those who do often disagree on this as well. However, changing it now would probably introduce be more pain than it solves.
- Insanity 1y ago
  Going to be nitpicky, while also saying +1 MSN, Skype, etc used emoticons and not emoji, and there wasn’t a standard that I’m aware of.
  - myfonj 1y ago
    True. And interestingly, the term "emoticon" was used both for the basic "ASCII" and fancy graphical representation. And while some "ASCII" sequences were present on multiple platforms, the meaning quite unsurprisingly often diverged, just like you implied. See some: [MSN emoticons] vs [Yahoo emoticons] :-* "Secret telling" vs "kiss" 8-| "Nerd" vs "rolling eyes" :| "Disappointed" vs "straight face" [MSN emoticons] https://web.archive.org/web/20031206095746/http://messenger.msn.com:80/Resource/Emoticons.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20031206095746/http://messenger.... [Yahoo emoticons] https://web.archive.org/web/20080408053458/http://messenger.yahoo.com/emoticons.php https://web.archive.org/web/20080408053458/http://messenger.... N.B. some of them are animated. Animated fonts coming when?
  - arp242 1y ago
    I'm reasonably sure they had graphical "emojis" rather than just ASCII "emotions" like :-). They weren't called "emojis" at the time of course, but basically, it's the same thing.
- throw7 1y ago
  unicode did not magically get rid of proprietary implementations... e.g. apple's "pistol".
uratbastrd 1y ago
Humans have other purposes than satisfying stated goals. That’s often described as a flaw, e.g. to err is human, but it’s what we do. Some degree of chaos can help for efficient problem-solving. Based on past history, we may never get perfect encoding for historical Earthlings, e.g. what about the following list looks well-planned and coordinated for the future?: ASCII, ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), ISO 8859-3, ISO 8859-4, ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic), ISO 8859-6 (Arabic), ISO 8859-7 (Greek), ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew), ISO 8859-8-I, ISO 8859-10, ISO 8859-13, ISO 8859-14, ISO 8859-15, ISO 8859-16, Windows-1250, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, Windows-1253, Windows-1254, Windows-1255, Windows-1256, Windows-1257, Windows-1258, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, GB2312, GBK, Big5, HZ-GB-2312, TIS-620, MacRoman, MacCyrillic, UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE/LE), UTF-32 (BE/LE), CESU-8, UTF-7, IBM866, IBM437, IBM850, IBM852, IBM855, IBM857, IBM862, IBM864, IBM866, KZ1048, IBM874 (TIS-620), VNI, Windows-874, Mac Thai, Mac Central European.

lifthrasiir 1y ago

Emoji can be seen as a bait for implementations to support under-represented or ancient scripts as a side effect. In fact, emoji worked so well that we now have a universal full non-BMP support everywhere. For example, MySQL used to have the cursed BMP-only utf8 charset aka utf8mb3! It lasted until everyone started to complain about emojis.

jan_Inkepa 1y ago

>Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine). Why do you say that? Because Unicode now has become balkanised between various CJK regions?

weinzierl 1y ago
Because it conflates distinct characters and therefore fails its original mission to encode all characters needed for written communication. Han Unification is just the most obvious case but the issues do not stop there. I'll give you a western example. In the sentence «Günther a souligné l’ambigüité de son discours.» there is an umlaut and a dieresis. They are different things with different function. In traditional book printing they used to look differently. With Unicode all this cultural nuance is lost. The characters necessary to communicate precisely simply have never been encoded, because Unicode forgot about its core mission. Fixing things like that is where I want to see efforts go.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]

arp242 1y ago

Unicode still does lots of work on language support. The notion that emoji support impedes that is simply not true. And people were already doing emojis with phpBB, MSN Messenger, etc. The alternative to Unicode emojis would not be "no emojis", but "every platform with their own proprietary incompatible implementation". Han Unification has been discussed a million times already. Originally Unicode only had 2 bytes and 65k characters. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not – I don't speak these languages and those who do often disagree on this as well. However, changing it now would probably introduce be more pain than it solves.

Insanity 1y ago
Going to be nitpicky, while also saying +1 MSN, Skype, etc used emoticons and not emoji, and there wasn’t a standard that I’m aware of.
- myfonj 1y ago
  True. And interestingly, the term "emoticon" was used both for the basic "ASCII" and fancy graphical representation. And while some "ASCII" sequences were present on multiple platforms, the meaning quite unsurprisingly often diverged, just like you implied. See some: [MSN emoticons] vs [Yahoo emoticons] :-* "Secret telling" vs "kiss" 8-| "Nerd" vs "rolling eyes" :| "Disappointed" vs "straight face" [MSN emoticons] https://web.archive.org/web/20031206095746/http://messenger.msn.com:80/Resource/Emoticons.aspx https://web.archive.org/web/20031206095746/http://messenger.... [Yahoo emoticons] https://web.archive.org/web/20080408053458/http://messenger.yahoo.com/emoticons.php https://web.archive.org/web/20080408053458/http://messenger.... N.B. some of them are animated. Animated fonts coming when?
- arp242 1y ago
  I'm reasonably sure they had graphical "emojis" rather than just ASCII "emotions" like :-). They weren't called "emojis" at the time of course, but basically, it's the same thing.
throw7 1y ago
unicode did not magically get rid of proprietary implementations... e.g. apple's "pistol".

uratbastrd 1y ago

Humans have other purposes than satisfying stated goals. That’s often described as a flaw, e.g. to err is human, but it’s what we do. Some degree of chaos can help for efficient problem-solving. Based on past history, we may never get perfect encoding for historical Earthlings, e.g. what about the following list looks well-planned and coordinated for the future?: ASCII, ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), ISO 8859-3, ISO 8859-4, ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic), ISO 8859-6 (Arabic), ISO 8859-7 (Greek), ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew), ISO 8859-8-I, ISO 8859-10, ISO 8859-13, ISO 8859-14, ISO 8859-15, ISO 8859-16, Windows-1250, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, Windows-1253, Windows-1254, Windows-1255, Windows-1256, Windows-1257, Windows-1258, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, GB2312, GBK, Big5, HZ-GB-2312, TIS-620, MacRoman, MacCyrillic, UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE/LE), UTF-32 (BE/LE), CESU-8, UTF-7, IBM866, IBM437, IBM850, IBM852, IBM855, IBM857, IBM862, IBM864, IBM866, KZ1048, IBM874 (TIS-620), VNI, Windows-874, Mac Thai, Mac Central European.