
Submitting Emoji Character Proposals - ingve
http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html
======
RIMR
Emoji is a fad that we're littering a well respected standard with.

In 15 years, we'll be wondering why Unicode is clogged with so many stupid
symbols.

I don't hate Emoji or anything, but it just seems unnecessary as part of the
Unicode standard. Standards don't have room for creativity like this, if that
makes sense...

~~~
cooper12
It might seem like a new fad to you, but emoji were long in use in Japan and
lacking standardization across major carriers. Not sure how I feel about the
consortium being the sole arbitrator of the expansion/globalization of the
symbols though. I'm not sure I'm exactly getting what you mean by creativity,
but it has been shown before in the decision to do Han unification [0] back
when there was less space. Modern Unicode has plenty of room though, and there
are quite a few dead languages in the standard.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification)

~~~
RIMR
Dead languages are real languages though. Emoji is stuff we're just making up
as we go along.

We could just create a WingDings-esque font for containing all of this stuff.
It would be better to incorporate multi-font support into more devices rather
than incorporate informal symbols into Unicode.

I am aware of the massive number of symbols represented in Unicode, but it
seems that the vast majority of them are related to existing languages, or
other symbols that are used in government. Not 400 different smileys of every
race, and cats...

Edit: By creativity, I mean that Unicode is about expressing language and
officially-recognized symbols. Incorporating art into it is contrary to the
purpose of Unicode.

~~~
WorldMaker
If you don't think that emoji is an expressive language then you may have
missed a few years of internet history. ;)

Some of the dead languages in Unicode arguably were never "real" languages and
history disputes if they were actual written forms for a language or merely
local doodles. Their relevance to Unicode is apparently there is so much
academic work still trying to sort out said history that papers are written
all the time with those dead symbols. (For all we know, some of them may even
be ancient emoji. :P )

The difference between "formal" and "informal" is a fuzzy zone. It's almost
like we're making up all of language as we go along. Unicode seems like a fine
place to standardize our growing need for emoji. Also, for what it is worth,
all of WingDings is also in Unicode and has been since early on.

My only criticism with emoji in Unicode is that I do think it means that
Unicode should reconsider its stance on previously closed proposals for
constructed languages like Klingon and Tengwar and maybe dedicate a section
somewhere outside of the basic multilingual plane (BMP) for them.

~~~
iamsohungry
> If you don't think that emoji is an expressive language then you may have
> missed a few years of internet history. ;)

If you think emoji is an expressive language, then I'd like you to make an
argument toward that point in emoji.

~~~
frenchy
I'm not the gp, but I think I can explain. Emoji isn't your prototypical "what
you learn in school" language, but there is a huge amount of language that you
don't learn in school. Emoji is kind of like non-verbal communication, which
is language. Also some emoji is certainly more language-y than others. Here's
why:

1\. Emoji only typically exists in the written form, but that isn't really a
strike against it: paragraphs, capital letters, and (to some extent) word-
breaks only exist in the written form too.

2\. They have a conceptual existence, and communicative force, that is
separate from any particular representation. You can't copy-write the smiley
grapheme. You could copy-write a particular smiley image (or "graph"), much
like you could copy-write a glyph, but that's it.

------
6d6b73
What a waste of time and resources. Soon when you install new operating system
it will tell you "You need at least 1PB of free space available to install
Times New Roman font. Do you want to continue?"

We should leave all of that unicode space available for all these new
extraterrestrials that will be soon visiting us.

~~~
panglott
Virtually no font tries to cover the entire Unicode space. Code2000 and GNU
Unifont are relatively comprehensive, and Arial Unicode MS is pretty good for
a mainstream font.

Making emojis Unicode will significantly improve their handling.

~~~
iamsohungry
> Making emojis Unicode will significantly improve their handling.

...and significantly hurt the handling of foreign language characters.

I'd be happy to have a standard for emoji. I'd be happy to have a standard for
interleaving emoji and text. What annoys me is that the standard for emoji has
been mashed into the standard for characters as if they are the same thing.
Mashing the two standards together means that people who only want to support
characters or only want to support emoji have no guidelines for doing so.

If you don't understand why this is bad, it's probably because you don't
understand type systems and the fact that emoji and characters are different
types.

~~~
johncolanduoni
> ...and significantly hurt the handling of foreign language characters.

How so? Emojis are far simpler than much of Unicode used for various languages
(no combining marks or complicated grapheme rules). If your program doesn't
shred code points outside the BMP, then it handles Emojis just fine.

> What annoys me is that the standard for emoji has been mashed into the
> standard for characters as if they are the same thing.

So you think it would be better to create an alternative encoding to
UTF-8/16/32 that allows mixing Unicode codepoints and Emoji codepoints, then
get all platforms to support it, then also completely restructure all the
text-shaping libraries which assume everything is a Unicode codepoint. Instead
of focusing on things like better RTL support, while just assigning some
codepoints to emoji which require no big changes in encoding or display.

> Mashing the two standards together means that people who only want to
> support characters or only want to support emoji have no guidelines for
> doing so.

They have the same guidelines that every font creator has been using for the
entirety of the existence of Unicode; only provide glyphs for the code points
you expect to be used, provide a nice box character for the rest. Most fonts
have a few thousand glyphs, while Unicode has assigned hundreds of thousands
of code points. Emoji are just a drop in that ocean.

> If you don't understand why this is bad, it's probably because you don't
> understand type systems and the fact that emoji and characters are different
> types.

Mathematical symbols and characters are "different types". However, the
excellent Unicode support for math symbols has been instrumental in
screenreader support for mathematical expressions, _since they are often next
to regular text_. And as far as distinguishing between different kinds of
characters, that's what the whole concept of formally defined Unicode
character properties[1] is for.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_character_property](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_character_property)

~~~
masklinn
> How so? Emojis are far simpler than much of Unicode used for various
> languages (no combining marks or complicated grapheme rules). If your
> program doesn't shred code points outside the BMP, then it handles Emojis
> just fine.

Hell, IME Emoji much improved awareness of and support for astral characters
(MySQL only finally added support for those soon-ish after emoji officially
got added to unicode), and I expect the same for non-atomic grapheme clusters
since features using these (flags, skin tones & groups) got added to recent
Unicode emoji. The fundamentally anglo-centric developer world had limited
intrinsic reason to care for either before emoji were added.

Next step, RTL.

------
chriswarbo
Some (biased) background on emoji in unicode:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITwM5GDIAI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tITwM5GDIAI)

------
chriswarbo
Could someone please explain when it would be preferable to send a 72x72 PNG
to the Unicode standards body, wait for them to accept it into their standard,
wait for applications/OSs/etc. to implement these new standards, and _then_
send a message using the new glyph; compared to just embedding the 72x72 PNG
in a message _right now_ ; as a data URI, a regular URL with a pre-populated
local cache, whatever?

~~~
skriticos2
Because afterward you only need to send about 4 bytes, instead of multiple KB,
because the other end already has the image and just needs the serial?

~~~
chriswarbo
URIs are a perfectly valid "serial", and only need a few bytes (e.g. see URL
shorteners). Receivers can look up images in a cache before trying to download
them, and caches can be pre-populated with thousands of popular images, by OS
vendors, application providers, users, etc.

------
ixtli
I wonder why no Japanese or Korean phone companies tried to make a standards
body for pictograms like this before.

~~~
rui314
In 90s, emojis were not interchangeable. Mobile careers were adding new emojis
to their proprietary character sets to differentiate their services from
others. Standardization would ruin that marketing efforts.

------
kevin_thibedeau
The biggest problem with more emoji is that it makes the task of choosing one
more tedious.

~~~
cooper12
Good point. One thing that stops me from using them is that its not clear what
some of them are and they're not searchable. I wish IME's allowed a fuzzy
search with multiple keywords for each emoji, as well as long-
pressing/hovering on them to get their descriptions.

