It’s like the Oxford English Dictionary decided that they’re actually poets; their main job is suddenly to invent brand new words that let people write with an exciting level of density and poetic license; and those new dictionary words would also be multi-color because everybody owns a pack of colored pencils, right.
How do you propose that Unicode include glyph innovations that are digital-first?
How often do people need to do that; with that level of fidelity, right down to the composition of the family? My suspicion is not often. A short sentence does this description just as good and is much less ambiguous, as in written, concise communication that is "emoji-rich" is filled with so many details (such as the composition of the family and their skintone) it's often not clear which details are important for the message and which are not. In addition because emojis are rendered differently on different devices the meaning may be lost (e.g. when apple changed the gun emoji to a watergun, many messages took on different meanings depending on if a revolver was used or a watergun)
so you're now dictating what can be said, rather than designing a system for which _anything_ that could be said is possible?
You're missing the goal of a system of writing and representation.
Surprisingly, this happens. I recently started to use a lot of emojis, including ones like these, to name calendar events - because I use a watch face on my smartwatch that renders the next 12 hours worth of events on the clock face, and given the small space, many of the events can fit three or four letters of description. Emojis work as great workaround, because I can encode things like "takeoff, gate A11" in 4 visual characters, or "doctor's visit" in one.
(I prefix the event titles with emojis rather than replace the longer form completely, because some of those events are shared, and sometimes I forget what an emoji stands for anyway...)
Now, this is perhaps an unique use case, but I found myself doing this in other scenarios too, like task planners - the common thread is, "not enough space to fit full label".
Unicode doesn’t include ligature code points for every English word either. Somehow we manage to keep glyphs and words separate. Why couldn’t we do the same for inline graphics?
The copyright situation around emoji is actually worse now than if they’d been kept out of the standard. People expect emojis to look like on iPhone, but those specific graphics are owned by Apple, leaving everybody else scrambling for emojis that look close enough without infringing.
If emojis had originally been released as an open source library of SVG graphics together with some kind of standard shorthand way to refer to them without embedding an entire inline URL, we could have truly open clip art instead of this weird semi-proprietary mess.
This way, we get an evolving library of emoji, just like how languages evolve. Unicode is stiffling this evolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software)
If I buy a set of stickers (little animations, much more expressive than emojis) I can send them to anyone in chats, or I can send the set as a gift to that user; in the latter case, the user can add them to their library.
Your library is the standard stickers, any free stickers you've added, anything you've bought, and anything you've been gifted.
The end result is that some people have a fairly distinct sticker-communication style because they have in their library relatively obscure ones, or just like to use the less-popular free ones.
In theory anyone can make their own stickers but it's kind of a pain, and I haven't gotten around to it:
https://creator.line.me/en/stickermaker/
So in my ideal world, we'd not have any emojis that can't be reduced to expressive ASCII, but we'd have a massive public library of freely available SVG Stickers with accessibility features, and all the chat apps would use them.
However, stickers have a culture of their own, and I don’t think it’s inferior to emojis, maybe it’s even better. You can express a lot in a sticker or two, without words, and quickly. And they’re not tiny ambiguous glyphs, they have the room they need.
So far in my Line experience I’m the only one using emojis (I should probably stop) because it seems like the standard is to use text to say specific things and use stickers to convey emotions.
I’m a foreigner and don’t have a million Line friends, but that’s how it looks to me.
Not really. Just Apple users.
Why does Unicode specifically need to include novel "innovations"?
It's arguably failure of the community that we have not been able to standardize interoperable higher level rich text formats, so now everything and kitchen sink needs to be bolted on Unicode instead in the name of interop.
Unicode chose to get into emoji because Japanese carriers were already making their own private character sets with emoji, and Unicode has a goal of being a superset of all other (relevant) character sets. (Arguably emoji support in Unicode has been a resounding success. Look at the world-wide enthusiasm around each new Unicode version that gets announced now!)
Why you need to?
We dealt without hieroglyphs just fine in communication.
With enough optimisation we might just be able to communicate with just a boolean-based language.
(i.e. why limit written communication rather than make it richer)
I think the actual argument here is encoding of seemingly arbitrary colored pictorial combinations overcomplicates character encoding. If you want to display a colored drawing of an arbitrary family SVG is already a thing but if you want to textually encode an arbitrary family you should use characters in your language not expect the text encoding to pick up more arbitrary drawings.
To me, using Emoji was probably a great way to force developer's hands on supporting certain encoding features more complicated languages use even in cases they only wanted to support latin text. That said, this job is already done. We don't need to continue putting everything into ever more complex pictorial encodings via Unicode for the rest of time.
Why or how does the Tahitian language take things too far?
You don't. You use text.
1F468 man
200D zero width joiner
1F469 woman
200D zero width joiner
1F467 girlSee, we invented this thing called the alphabet. You memorize some 20 symbols and combine them to express every possible emotion, instead of memorizing a gazillion symbols.
It’s no wonder hieroglyphs have fallen out of favour in the last 5k years.
Nobody I know or have seen online replaces random words with emoji for brevity. That's annoying. At worst I've seen ironic posts or trying to be hip outlets adding the emoji for a word after the word itself, or use them as bullet point markers.
It reminds me of a thing where it was like, "elephants are so smart because they can use this trumpet to communicate danger", and someone pointed out that humans can do that too by using words. Mind blown.
Using nifty little things called jpegs.
Since the images can be arbitrary you also open yourself up to bugs in the parser.
All around a much, much worse idea compared to text emojis.
You need a "supported editor" to display Unicode emojis too, as TFA shows. And supposedly it is quite hard. OTOH displaying jpegs is a solved problem.
Let's give this a try. This is roughly what a sentence with an emoji looks like in an unsupported editor:
hello [] world
(with [] being the well-known "placeholder" square). Now let's try the same with an emoji, I went with 16x16 to make this kind of bearable, but realistically you'd want at least 64x64:
hello data:image/jpeg;base64,/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEASABIAAD/2wBDAAEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQH/2wBDAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQEBAQH/wAARCAAQABADAREAAhEBAxEB/8QAFwAAAwEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIICv/EABwQAAIDAQEBAQAAAAAAAAAAAAQFAgMGBwEIFP/EABoBAAEFAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACAwUGCAn/xAAhEQACAwEBAAICAwAAAAAAAAADBAECBQYHCBITFAAVFv/aAAwDAQACEQMRAD8A1xbv6+xizYBjaeOtvSMunT5XmVeTDaMAP1waXJyNft7FFlPoub9OHjK5gylJQmBICnfTMgi+6PJ31n5YubHpnY4S5H1eV89d3MumSj0TmCPdLhNmR0dDQNmtpM65HTrHjKxrGlSiY4JdczZL3ppUPljuLz2OdUaRNLYxkt119xdcp1qvKjcXzcyGqFquRYJq1YKGsNMNQSsFqCg6SYX6+xjPYGDZivWjpVnTYcr06vWBtFy/0qbSlPRsMTNtbb6VnPDSJSoYrfYqHIQxsqKIkUUX+nlHyybyPS+OwjkeZ5b0F3DzL5LvQubwsMu44FFB/PNotus45UjtB/tMehoUIpeb1XC0OhJDeWu7XPa5mqJD0cjGd3En011xHZ/RVK4fN04VGKpyMADaoSHiWlmfxRJLAuQf8hP6/wCB/SXGOkaDZ8hzrbo/P9m4cPaglrLqYUMzY1bMHRKs2rm7sSauQJTQgcNqyXkL2CyC+uZwRYNw5E5634bPnnYdjtF8WzPYuM7vo9DrQPL4mrodHyWlpkufUyT2wzhfpi2Nf9hMn1MvWZvFq0Na/wBrpyHYZHoGDgotdn/juj5vJTwzpuuZS+duLJCoBTRWtrhuuV2wxxRoNCCNF5mYggvrML8fcA+kuydHRbPryFxz3BZFumdXAs2PUzB9D4qbrnlCoCrpLwyxrewKVjCmN1q8ZetVTY0wNNKYVD0NeTeF39G7Pjdsfi+Z45xXBdCj1bDh8TUz+i67TziiPl5Qp3DnfJjjMKTtkn8K8zMfWtzVH9V9h2GN59z+8ir2Udl0nSZTeKuok7lsZ+Eu2Ei7WgxbICNcLlRkmq4bXIebxWZgYvvaf//Z world
Now, which one is more readable?
If it was the case, Emoji is seriously lacking a penis. I mean, seriously, give men a way to draw and this is what you will get. There are already existing "subjective combinations" like 8===D and the eggplant emoji for which it is its most common use. There is a proper penis in the hieroglyphics, but just because there is a hieroglyphic doesn't mean there is no corresponding emoji (ex: eye).
On the other hand, many emoji pass even though I have never seen anything remotely similar being scribbled ever, it is the addition to the emoji block that drove its use. Plus, because inclusivity, all its equivalents in different genders, skin tones, cultures, etc...
Clearly, Unicode acts as an arbiter here. It decides on what it thinks it is "good" rather than what is really in use. And it is not just about penises, the hangman is also absent, as is the "gun pointed on head" sign (suggesting suicide) that is commonly used in real life.
Worth noting that the first emoji were included because they were already in common use before Unicode, in Japanese phones specifically. Unicode just included them so that Japanese users could switch to Unicode without loss of functionality.
There is even a "phallus with emission" variant.
𓂺
Not even BabelMap or BabelPad have a font showing more than a square.
𓂲𓂺
Sorry if this doesn't make sense.
So a closer analogy would be the Oxford English Dictionary adding newly-coined words, which—of course—they do https://www.oed.com/discover/the-oed-september-2021-update/ in addition to expanding coverage of older words (analogous to the Unicode Consortium working on historical scripts).
NB if you don't like multi-color emoji, you can also use a monochrome font for them.
Re: monochrome emoji rendering — an impossible proposition if you need to render any user-generated text. People simply can’t understand that their emoji might look different than when they picked it on their iPhone keyboard. The supposed rendering latitude on emojis is completely imaginary; in practice you need to get an emoji set that’s as close as possible to Apple’s without infringing on their design copyrights.
You can, as long as you control the font. Pick any codepoint in the Private Use Area and have your font define a picture for it. That's the whole idea behind icon fonts.
> People simply can’t understand that their emoji might look different than when they picked it on their iPhone keyboard.
Android users who pick an emoji on their Google keyboard and then have something different show up in the message they sent seem to be able to cope somehow.
But if you can't get away from imitating the Apple look because of wrong users, you could still try converting it to monochrome. Maybe users will forgive the deviation if it makes sense in context, e.g. for a terminal emulator.
Granted, that it's supposed to emulate a teletypewriter but I think that ship sailed a long time ago.
Another problem is that some emojis are horribly missing. For example during COVID it would have been nice to have a cotton swab thing.
:face-palm:
Why? It would be next to meaningless now but have to be supported forever. This actually exemplifies why they need to be more strict about what goes in.
The whole emoji phenomenon is a kind of infantilizing cultural rot -- it makes serious, static documentation and tooling resemble a children's book and hinders live communication by encouraging vague single-pictogram messages and the expression of raw emotions (genuine or not) instead of mature and balanced thoughts.
"Single-pictogram messages and expression of raw emotion" are simply not mutually exclusive with mature, well-considered, intentional communication.