Hacker News Reader

Comment by bgruber | Hacker News Reader

i had never before read about the unicode flags, and the rather (politically and technically) brilliant end run around the problem. fascinating.

View on HN

I am torn between it being brilliant, versus it should have been taken as a sign that adding all those symbols was just a waste of time. I sort of feel like Unicode 5 is jumping the shark here. At the point where you're arguing about how to refer to the color of the hair on one of your "graphemes", may I humbly suggest that the goal of creating a complete global encoding scheme is apparently done and the committee ought to disband. Unicode has apparently ceased being about being a universal encoding for human text and expanded its mission into becoming a universal icon catalog. This is just silly. Next up in Unicode 7, we deprecate the face icons in favor of a series of combining characters that allow to mix and match hairstyles, face colors, eyes, noses, etc., to create arbitrary faces, why not.

There is still important work to be done with respect to code point unification. Notably, encoding ancient or minority scripts that don't have national governments advocating on their behalf.

Unfortunately, entrenched business and political interests have made encoding flags and emoticons a higher priority.

Or you could consider that 140million Japanese (not sure about other countries) have been using emoji every day for the last 10+ years on their cellphones.

They've become part of the language and it would be culturally insensitive to give them a big "fuck you, us westerner's don't need your damn icons, either keep those to yourself and hence don't be able to inter-operate with everyone else or stop using them even though they've been a big part of your culture for 10+ years"

Should every fad or handset feature adopted by 2% or more of the global population be incorporated into Unicode?

Sort of. Unicode is designed to unify all character sets, eventually. 2% of the world's population using a character set (granted, not traditional characters here but it still counts) is enough.

You're trying to make me feel bad, but you're doing it with a false dilemma: Either we stick emoji in Unicode or the Japanese are screwed and we told them to "fuck" off. This is a false dilemma, and exactly the sort of thinking that worries me as we fuzzily expand the charter of Unicode beyond a universal grapheme repository. I say there's plenty of third options, many of which are better choices than jamming it into the international all-purpose standard.

Unicode is supposed to be the central hub for all graphemes, but I would certainly like to see some argument that emoji are actually graphemes. For one thing it's quite bizarre that suddenly Unicode appears to be specifying colors as well as shapes, which is one bright line I'd be concerned about. (There may have been colors before but they would be much more exceptional, and I'm not aware of any.) Unicode was ambitious as the all-grapheme repository, it's simply a guaranteed failure if it tries to become the repository of all vaguely iconic/smilyish/little pictures in the world.

Japanese do mix emoji with kanji and kana. Are emoji any less graphemes than the mor pictographic han characters? I don't think the colors are normative though, any more than the exact shape is. A different representation of a love hotel ought to be fine.

The colors I'm referring to are the ones in the names of the code points, such as the ones the Germans complained about It doesn't get much more normative than that.

Ah, that grapheme doesn't actually have color IIRC, but the hair is not filled, thus giving the impression of a fair-haired person (rather than dark haired)

> we deprecate the face icons in favor of a series of combining characters that allow to mix and match hairstyles, face colors, eyes, noses, etc., to create arbitrary faces, why not.

Encoding Mii's in Unicode, brilliant! Nintendo should really try to get a spot on the committee.

Unicode is probably the closest we are today to world peace. If we can get all this somewhat right, including the flags, the noodles and the 'person with blond hair', I think there is hope...

Wholeheartedly agreed. We've gone from killing each other over hair and skin color, to arguing about them in committee.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com