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Comment by sidarape | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only one that find the whole emoji thing a bit ridiculous?

Not ridiculous, but I think Unicode consortium's resources could be spent better.

This is my opinion about including emoji in Unicode, not the skin color modifiers.

I can only think of it as a case of bike-shedding. Han unification, indic scripts or the lack of differentiation between umlaut and diaeresis are difficult and require experts to be solve satisfactorily. Emojis are easy and anyone is able to contribute a little bit.

What is the scope of Unicode?

  Unicode covers all the characters for all the writing 
  systems of the world, modern and ancient. [1]

Sure, emojis are used for communication, but so are images, logos, emblems, coats of arms. Will we have company logos next? Hopefully not.

[1] http://www.unicode.org/faq/basic_q.html

There is a certain irony to Unicode releasing an update that adds support for modern hieroglyphics. It's as if human recorded word is staged to come full circle

Is there a standardized or widespread character set with company logos or coats of arms?

Does Unicode only accept characters which are in an already standardized or widespread character set?

Company logos are widespread on the web and in icon fonts. 145 of the 585 glyphs in Font Awesome 4.0.0 are brand icons This is one quarter. Of the 2000 icons in the Ultimate Icons Pack 354 are "social logos". Other fonts are similar.

I don't want to see them included in Unicode but I see more arguments for logos in Unicode than for emojis.

I believe countryballs would be a more popular demand ;)

(Damn. Now I want it. Would be a perfect addition to any political discussion. And don't forget about COUNTRYBALL MODIFIER ANSCHLUSS EYES.)

The thing is, emojis were being used (appeared in the 90s), and spreading (how many people used various tricks and hacks to "unlock" emojis in older iOS versions despite not being in Japan?), so the unicode consortium could either standardise it, or see the number of proprietary extensions increase further and less and less people give a flying fuck about their registry.

You might have a point, but why would, for instance, iOS uses its own proprietary emojis if everybody that has Android cannot see them?

Why not? But you certainly don't have to trust me on that: it's what actually happened. Apple added support for Softbank (unicode-based) emoji when they started working on japan, and non-japanese started using that even though it only worked between iOS devices[0] (didn't even work on OSX IIRC). Hell iOS has its own proprietary messaging system and people use that.

[0] it actually required "unlocking" the relevant keyboard by starting an application which used those characters or something like that, shit was crazy, it took several ios versions for apple to make the emoji keyboard available to any and all OOTB

    so the unicode consortium could either standardise it, 
    or see the number of proprietary extensions increase 
    further and less and less people give a flying fuck 
    about their registry.

I'd say:

    so the unicode consortium could either standardise it, 
    or see the emoji fad disappear as quickly as it appeared.

Admittedly I don't know much about the situation in Japan or in other countries where emoji became popular in the 90s, but I'm curious.

In particular I have no clue how popular they really were (only youth phenomenon?) and how many people somehow depended on them. In English or German you can get along quite well without emoji. Maybe communication in other languages depends more heavily on emoji because emotions can't be expressed concisely? Or is there another reason why they became popular in Japan first.

Yup, you're not alone.

In my personal opinion, that's more of rich text formatting (text with images), not extra characters anymore. That's debatable (and the debate's lost already, huh) but I still believe pictures (emojis) should've been a separate encoding, independent from Unicode, as there is a distinction between a grapheme and icon (yes, the distinction's very blurred by pictograms and ideograms - and I'm not sure I get all those things correctly, but still...)

Yeah exactly. Emoji might charitably be called an extension of punctuation, but some of the stuff that ends up in the Unicode spec seems pretty crazy.

I mean, there's a Moai head in this set.

I did at first, but talking to people younger than 20 changed my mind.

Saying "the whole emoji thing" is like saying "the whole texting thing" in 2003 or "the whole internet thing" in 1997. They're here to stay, calling them ridiculous marks you as dated. Whether you care is up to you. 😜

I'm not against emoticon even if I don't like, for instance, all the big emoticon that facebook uses, but I like using a few like :P or ;). My point is that it's should stay like it is currently with a combination of ascii symbol instead of adding unicode character for each face, emotions, things that exist in the world.

No.

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