So, uh, what's the actual use of this? Think about it, normal emoji are pretty neutral since their features are abstract and they have a skin color (bright yellow) that doesn't exist anyway. If I send a smiley face with a skin tone attached I'm suddenly making a political statement with a smiley face. That just seems weird.
I believe Black people were not really represented. Yellow can be interpreted as white or Asian but possible not African/black skin colour. For example at the "Princess" emoji it appears to be a blonde girl. So I want my princess emoji to look more like my girlfriend maybe. This is prevalent all over the world, here in South Africa for example If you look for example at childrens books and toys there is also a lack of representation of black skin colour.
Should emoji "represent" anyone at all though? I always considered them an abstract representation of an emotional state, not a person. I guess the advantage of the old school method (punctuation marks, like ":-)" ) is that they're so abstract that they obviously represent an idea rather than a group or a person.
That's my take on it as well. I guess it can make some sense to add skin color to emoji that represent people. But a lot of them represent emotions and mental states:
"I'm happy"
"I'm surprised"
"I'm listening"
Things that are universal to all humans. Will adding skin color to those emoji really enable better communication, or just create issues?
I hear your argument, we do need to abstract away from race. That said with the black guy I can do a like a cool brother emoji, just need the comb in the hair ... the white man with the moustache can represent my dad from the 70's. ha ha ;-)
Anyway there's that Microsoft grey emoji too, but it looks a bit bland.
I don't really get the idea either, emojis are used to represent emotion not skin color (that's why it's called emoji in the first place...) if people want it black or replace them with cat faces, it should be up to them. What's the benefit of specifying explicitly that they should be displayed black ?
"Political statement with every emoji" sounds about right.
Certain groups hate the fact that the Internet allows people to overlook the boundaries of race, nationality and gender. It robs those groups of fuel for manufacturing outrage and leveraging it for political power. They'd love to "fix" it.
You think I'm wrong? Okay, then tell me this. Why can't we just color emoji a neutral color (green, blue) and be done with it? Nope, instead we're adding this insanely complicated stuff to Unicode definition.
There's no complexity to combining characters, it's something that's been there all along. What's the technical difference between e becoming é and [boy] becoming [black boy]? There isn't one is the answer Both U+1F3FB "EMOJI MODIFIER FITZPATRICK TYPE-1-2" and U+00B4 "ACUTE ACCENT" are non-reorderable modifier symbols. U+00B4 is somewhat more complex actually, because it's a diacritic with Break_Before linebreak and specific arabic shaping.
Except that all of it needs to be translated to code, it involves operations with color (or multiplying the number of certain icons by 5), it needs to have a slightly different behavior (i.e. more code) on black-and-white screens, and so on. And just because there is already high level of complexity involved in something does not mean you should gleefully add to it.
Combining characters and ligatures have existed since Unicode 1.0 in 1991, skin colors aren't a different mechanism and if they require more code because you've hardcoded either I'm sorry to report you're a moron.
The only thing which may have required more code is multi-color font glyphs and that's not a new things of emoji skin colors that was at best a new optional thing back when emoji were first introduced.
> it needs to have a slightly different behavior (i.e. more code) on black-and-white screens
Actually there is. This stuff caused problems ever since it appeared. There have been known bugs and vulnerabilities caused by combined characters.
More than that, I don't think I can provide any references now, but I remember some vulnerabilities caused by improper implementation of emoji alone in applications supposed to support them.
So both always were somewhat of a problem, except combining characters are obviously more important and hence more justified.
Now we have both combined. What unexpected behavior this will lead to? None of us can know.
