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.
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.
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?
> 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.)
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.
I feel like emoji input is better handled by the user's OS, so that each website out there doesn't need to reinvent the wheel and keep it up to date.
But, that said, I'm not sure what support is like for such things. About the best I've seen is OS X's character input. (The dialog that appears on Command+Control+Space.) Linux has IBus, but it could be better. I've no idea if Windows ever grew anything. (I haven't used it since about Vista.)
Windows 10 got an emoji picker some time ago, opened by `Win+period` or `Win+semicolon`.
it's okay, except that the emoji search seems to use the current keyboard language and not the system language, which is kind of annoying. I don't want to have to remember which language my keyboard is set to to search for a plane emoji!
Wrike has an emoji picker, but we don't use it much in our group because it's so small that it's hard to make out what the characters are supposed to be.
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.
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".
Huh that's weird. It's been my experience that I see far,far more comments from people like you who are upset over "manufactured outrage" than people who are actually outraged. It's odd how much people feel the need to signal that they don't get Outraged™ like everyone else.
Amazing how different our experiences can be. I see Twitter drowning in that sort of thing whenever I hop on, along with the related complaint about “special treatment!!!1” whenever inequities get addressed.
The whole point is not that people are upset over 'inequities being addressed' - it's that they do not necessarily feel that their are true inequities.
The choice of your words kind of indicates the bias in perspective, not that it's wrong, but those words might be 'talking past the other' in the issue.
From the article: 'a picture of a yellow person was still interpreted as white'. Well, so what? Is that really an 'inequity'? Who was perceiving it, why, and does it actually matter? Maybe it does, but there's a good chance that it does not.
A 'yellow man in work outfit' - this is gendered, surely, but we live in a gendered world. Is it sexist? Possibly but probably not. We could put a woman, surely, but then what about non-binaries? Intersex? Transgender?
It's probably worthwhile to have the discussion - but I'm afraid this discussion will not end. Case and point, a Guardian article I read recently demanding an end to the notion that 'family is two people with 1+ children'. Reasonable. So then how do we integrated this into emojis?
The line has to be drawn, and wherever we draw it, it's going to be a little bit arbitrary and exclude some.
We're all a little special and irrespective how how normative we may be in one context, we're not in another and that's that. (Saying this is a waspy male who's been an immigrant/minority in a few places including where I live now).
We see portrayals of people every day - it doesn't mean that these portrayals are politicized or represent anything.
FYI - the article refers to kind of a reduced concern among pop culture, which I think is partly what I'm getting at - this venture is getting a little pointless to most people, even 'allies'.
We can be nice and reasonable people and still move on without being in a permanent culture war.
To be clear, my reference to “inequities being addressed” was not about emoji. It was about actual issues where rights are involved. For example, whenever a state enacted marriage equality, there would a very outspoken group of people who would start whining about how gay people are getting “special treatment” when in fact they are getting equal, and equitable, treatment.
We can also be nice and reasonable people without constantly accusing each other of trying to incite a culture war.
It's been my experience that I see far,far more comments from people like you who are upset over "manufactured outrage" than people who are actually outraged.
My comment is reinforced by the linked article which mentions a number of these instances, like the Atlantic reporter who didn't like the dumpling emoji.
The issue is that the "outraged crowd" has a habit to assume they have the moral highground and start forcing changes to rules/habits/processes/... even when their views are shared by far less than 50% of the population.
For those who do not agree with those changes, it becomes pretty important to actually be vocal about it, otherwise the "outraged" will assume that you are totally on board with their views. And since they are very quick to try to marginalize you by avoiding a healthy debate and quickly associating you with the worse of humanity, the easiest (and sometimes only) way to "win" is just to show that no, you are no nazi for believing $OPINION, because a lots of people believe that if you ask them.
So by all means be vocal about your opionions wether you are outraged and want to see society change, or you aren't and find some views blown out of proportion. This is the only way to actually measure if the majority of the population wants stuff to change. And that's how democracy works - which everyone should respect.
>The issue is that the "outraged crowd" has a habit to assume they have the moral highground and start forcing changes to rules/habits/processes/... even when their views are shared by far less than 50% of the population.
I don't think the majority of the population has views worthy of "the moral highground". Most of humanity isn't very nice; just look at the world. We're mostly riding inertial culture from the past and evolutionary optimizations which we mutate only slightly as time passes.
I also think they should be pressured toward more enlightened worldviews because those worldviews are still better whether or not they have majority subscription.
>And since they are very quick to try to marginalize you by avoiding a healthy debate and quickly associating you with the worse of humanity
Yep. It's sad. This causes a lot of cognitive dissonance and alienation. I think a major reason for it is that the literal nazis, today, are rarely blunt. They use dog whistling, memes, and implication that gives plausible deniability and a way to elide accusations or deplatforming. A heuristic, then, that many people grab to adapt to that is assuming the meta of what someone seems to be saying. This is pretty sound (never accepts a nazi) but not at all complete (rejects many non-nazis).
>So by all means be vocal about your opionions wether you are outraged and want to see society change, or you aren't and find some views blown out of proportion. This is the only way to actually measure if the majority of the population wants stuff to change. And that's how democracy works - which everyone should respect.
I think you'd be wrong to assume that everyone has equal expression in society. Just look at the nazis, for example. So our measuring technique is dysfunctional.
I also think that, even if that wasn't the case, this isn't the best way to reach positive social change.
I think the majority of the world is very sexist, for example, and therefore don't want meaningful societal changes that level the sexual playing field (a clever, diplomatic way to put this is a philosophical objection, like "we should have equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome"). Does that mean that maintaining the sexist status quo is the best moral thing to do? I don't think so. And that's for positive change; what if the majority votes for negative change? I can't respect that just because the majority wills it any more than the nazis respect the mainstream's censure of their ideology.
Why should we blame Unicode for this? Emoji-like features were used for a long time on Internet forums, in SMS-like mobile apps, and even as "dingbats" in printed text. Emojis in Unicode are simply standardizing support for this long-term practice and making it interoperable across systems.
[1] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-be...