Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

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> Emoji is a fad

Considering emoji are older than many of their users, that's one hell of an assertion.

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

Yes because U+1F32E TACO is so much stupider than U+27B0 CURLY LOOP, U+2554 BOX DRAWINGS DOUBLE DOWN AND RIGHT, U+1031B OLD ITALIC LETTER ERS, U+3375 SQUARE OV or fucking U+10472 SHAVIAN LETTER ICE

> I don't hate Emoji or anything

Yes, yes you do.

> it just seems unnecessary as part of the Unicode standard

It's part of messages, being able to display both regular text and emoji mixed together without requiring incompatible custom image embedding extensions is useful and convenient.

>fucking U+10472 SHAVIAN LETTER ICE

Oh no you di'int just hate on my Shavian alphabet!

Unicode is supposed to express writing systems. The Shavian alphabet is a writing system, even if it isn't in widespread use. It's apparently used more than Klingon though, as Klingon isn't included due to lack of widespread use. If I'm wrong on this, maybe we can convince the SEI to include Klingon? :)

Also as far as people being against emoji - the document covers why [1]. Unifying things is nice, so you don't give a smiley emoji to one person only to have it rendered as a "flipping the bird" emoji by another vendor. It's to aid in communication due to the widespread use of emoji characters. I was initially against the addition of them but you know what? The argument is pretty solid and backs what Unicode is trying to accomplish.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shavian_alphabet

[1] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51-2.html

> > I don't hate Emoji or anything

> Yes, yes you do.

Was this necessary?

I suspect he had nothing else to talk down to me about, so he chose the most trivial thing he could.

Define "necessary". Did it need to be explicitly noted? Yes I think so.

You're entitle to your opinion, however wrong it may be.

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