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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

It is so stupid that Emojis render differently on different platforms. In particular there are subtle differences among the facial expression emojis that make them pretty useless if you’re not sure the recipient is on the same platform that you’re choosing one on.

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It's a reminder that these are glyphs, on the same plane as words, aimed at portability.

I think what you are looking for is stamps and png/gifs, which are also supported in most relevant chat platforms these days.

An encoding for words that allowed rendering as different words on different platforms would also be stupid.

  MacOS: grimace
  Windows: frown
  Android: scowl
  Samsung: growl
  Firefox: angry face

That’s pretty much what the emoji situation is today. I don’t understand what the actual use case is for the requirement that emojis differ across platforms.

Yes, I realize they are widely used, but they are widely used despite this stupidity, not because of it.

Do you have any examples of current emojis that clearly have a very different meaning on different platforms? What you're saying might have been true 5+ years ago, but over time emojis have become more and more similar.

Here is just one random article from Emojipedia about the history of the "folded hands" emoji: https://blog.emojipedia.org/emojiology-folded-hands/ There are many more examples.

In addition to that, almost all emoji keyboards now autocomplete the emoji based on standard names, so if you search for "disappointed" on most any emoji keyboard, you will get the same face.

For reference, here is the current official emoji set, including the standard names and images showing how they render on different platforms: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html

The famous example is the pistol emoji, which is rendered as either a real gun or a water gun depending on platform. Lots of scope for misunderstanding there!

This has not been true since early 2018. See: https://blog.emojipedia.org/all-major-vendors-commit-to-gun-... There was only a couple of years when vendors rendered it differently, and they worked toward a consensus, as they have for many other emojis.

Even if there was no vendor consensus, I'm not sure what the misunderstanding could be with this particular emoji. There is only one pistol emoji, and regardless of whether it is rendered as a water pistol or a revolver, it still is used to represent the concept of a pistol. There are better examples of emojis that used to be displayed with a facial expression or hand gesture that had a relatively different meaning depending on the platform. For example face with rolling eyes, person tipping hand (information desk person) and so on.

It still rendered as a revolver on the phone I used to write that comment. Guess I'm still on 2017 Android. Please do not invite me to any water gun parties.

> Do you have any examples of current emojis that clearly have a very different meaning on different platforms? What you're saying might have been true 5+ years ago, but over time emojis have become more and more similar.

Well... yes? That's because avalys is obviously correct. The "solution" defined by the Unicode consortium is so spectacularly stupid that everyone has unanimously agreed to move away from it by synchronizing their images, because it makes no sense to send an image unless you know what it will look like.

Rendering differently on an older platform is also an important difference (consider those who can't afford the latest phones). E.g. the gun one has a very different meaning on (some) older platforms from newer ones.

I think this is basically what's happening on the JCK plane with glyphs that have the same code, but slightly different representations depending on the font (e.g. Chinese or Japanese), with potentially wildly different meanings in the language they are used.

To your point, this is an aspect where integrating and regularily adding emojis to unicode pushed a very technical system under popular attention, and attracted a lot of people from unrelated backgrounds who now have to understand how it works and what its goals in the first place.

> I think this is basically what's happening on the JCK plane with glyphs that have the same code, but slightly different representations depending on the font (e.g. Chinese or Japanese), with potentially wildly different meanings in the language they are used.

It was even more dumb when they did it for CJK. Unicode is now neither fish nor fowl; you can't rely on things to look the same in different places, but you can't rely on them to mean the same either; there's no proper separation of concerns because they decided it's fine for the meaning of a character to change based on the font you're using.

Yes, it's not an ideal solution on many respects.

I kind of get why we got here, as encodings were a quagmire for a long time, and coming to a real clean, everybody's happy solution with unicode looked completely unrealistic.

We now have way better compatibility, got to settle for one encoding in most cases, and the annoyances are for now somewhat manageable (if/when China opens more to the global net, it might be a different story). Installing fonts is still easier than adding encoding compatibilities.

On a serious note: Yes, I agree. On a comical note: Reminds me of the great "Cheeseburger-gate" scandal of 2017, in which Google put the cheese under the burger patty instead of on top of. https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/30/16569346/burgergate-emoj...

Problem is that each tech company uses a proprietary set of emoji so they couldn't standardize even if they wanted. Many instant messaging apps work around this by using their own emoji set for all users but this is also often annoying especially when the emoji are ugly.

The solution is to allow users to use their own svg libraries when sending messages, and the ability to manage these libraries by copying inline symbols from messages sent by others.

This would promote an open culture of creating inline symbols. E.g. where is our "covid" symbol, and why do we have to wait for the Unicode consortium to define it for us, and app makers to implement it??

I like telegram's sticker system best. User defined images which you can organize and store in the UI for easy access.

Please not. That would be the tower to Babel. Afterwards we are all just going bla bla and don't understand each other at all, because everyone invents its own funny secret emoji language.

> Afterwards we are all just going bla bla and don't understand each other at all, because everyone invents its own funny secret emoji language.

Just like we all go "bla bla" on the phone because we can choose our own sounds?

Yes, we could have wide support for inline svg by now.

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