
Emoji, part 6c: to infinity and beyond? - breadbox
https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2019/04/emoji-part-6c-to-infinity/
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gourlaysama
The 8-part series this comes from (starting here [1]) was a really good read.
Very informative, regardless of one's stance on emoji.

[1] [https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-
be...](https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-beginning/)

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sonnyblarney
I wonder if doing this in Unicode was a huge mistake.

Reading this article seems to me we are pulling the thread of a sweater, and
getting caught in an unsolvable intersection of intersectionalist social
issues (pun intended!). FYI I'm not taking sides other than to say we live in
an _actually_ diverse world and people have different social mores wether we
like them or not, this talk will never end.

Maybe we should just have allowed 'svg' images into text, and you pick
whatever you want to send to that person, and they see what you sent and
that's that.

Then anyone can do anything, publicly, privately, whatever.

It's already getting hard with Emojis getting into text and passwords, it's
making it just ugly.

Everyone could then 'do their own' thing and that's it.

We also could be past the peak of this emoji trend, they are here to stay in
some ways, but I don't think the specificity is really that-that important. We
just don't use most of these characters very often at all.

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earenndil
Alternately:

We have all this unused space with which to send characters.

Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?

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sonnyblarney
"Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?"

Because 'bandwidth' and 'extra unicode spaces' are effectively irrelevant to
the situation.

This is a very common psychological dilemma among engineers - we tend to think
of 'sizes we can measure' and 'performance'. When often the issues are not
relevant.

It would be like adding a $500 gadget to your car that hangs out the back to
go 0.01 cents better fuel mileage.

Emojis are turning into a mess - every time I grab user content these days, I
have to flush for weird combinations of characters.

Worse: the representation is not only different in terms of images, but some
editors combine Emojis differently - resulting in different numbers of
characters.

There should be 20 emojis - they should be in the BMP (not extended char set)
- and that should be it.

Then, otherwise, you send SVGs. You get the added benefit of having 'whatever
you want'. If there are some common rules around image sizes etc. we could be
ok. SVGs are generally small thankfully. Much bigger than text, but still
relatively small.

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earenndil
> It would be like adding a $500 gadget to your car that hangs out the back to
> go 0.01 cents better fuel mileage.

Except that it doesn't cost you anything if you don't use it.

> Emojis are turning into a mess - every time I grab user content these days,
> I have to flush for weird combinations of characters.

Why? This I don't understand. You have user content, it has emoji—so what? How
does that affect your ability to process it as-is?

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Abishek_Muthian
Has anyone here integrated emoji web picker in their website/web app? What's
the recommended flow.

I see that the library by OneSignal is rated high[1], but it's 2 years since
updated; I guess it misses out on few emoji sprites.

Isn't it high time input type=emoji is made a standard or is it a bad idea?

[1]:[https://github.com/OneSignal/emoji-
picker](https://github.com/OneSignal/emoji-picker)

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kccqzy
Emojis are what normal people consider "characters," not entire fields unto
themselves. Would input=emoji accept pure emoji without text? What if people
want to mix emojis and normal text?

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thaumasiotes
> Emojis are what normal people consider "characters"

I'm pretty sure emoji are what normal people consider images. Their
implementation as characters is a mistake, and the source of several problems
that normal people have with them. (Most notably, imagining that the person
you're talking to sees the same thing you sent.)

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pitaj
If emoji are images, then Chinese characters are images. Each emoji has a
meaning on its own, and can have different meanings in context. There are
combinations of emojis (emoji "sentences" if you will) representing complex
concepts.

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esilver
Important to point out that the linked article, in addition to being highly-
informative and well-researched is also an exemplary application of type
design worthy of emulation.

If you’re running a SAAS business you can admire it; if you publish a blog or
editorial site by all means copy it.

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pluma
However if the entire point of your article is to talk about how emoji look,
it's a terrible idea to include them verbatim when discussing a specific
design.

It's clear that in certain cases the article talks about a reference design or
how the emojis are supposed to look. They likely checked in a browser on macOS
to make sure it reads correctly, too.

But good luck if you're on Windows or Android. Apparently the Microsoft mage
is a wizard with a white beard. Not exactly "gender neutral".

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jstewartmobile
A regression to hieroglyphics, a collation and rendering nightmare, a security
morass, AND a volley in the culture wars...

Unicode is the gift that keeps on giving.

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a1369209993
We really need a non-broken universal character set. Is anyone actually
working on that?

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GuB-42
Yes, that's what the Unicode consortium is doing.

If you look at
[https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/](https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/)
you will see that emoji is just a small part of it.

I know that there is some controversy, in particular regarding han
unification, but in practice, Unicode works well enough.

