Unicode Consortium Looks At Symbols For Allergies

AmiMoJo writes: A proposal (PDF) submitted by a Google engineer to the Unicode Consortium asks that food allergies get their own emojis and be added to the standard. The proposal suggests the addition of peanuts, soybeans, buckwheat, sesame seeds, kiwi fruit, celery, lupin beans, mustard, tree nuts, eggs, milk products and gluten. According to TNW: "This proposal will take a little longer to become reality — it's still in very early stages and needs to be reviewed by the Unicode Consortium before it can move forward, but it'll be a great way for those with allergies to quickly express them."

Comments

Shouldn't this work the other way?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

This doesn't seem like an intrinsically bad idea; things like the GHS hazard pictograms, DIN 4844-2, ISO 3864, TSCA marks, and similar such things seem like perfectly reasonable additions to Unicode(some of them are already there).

What seems like more of a problem is the idea that the Unicode Consortium is out there fishing for ideas. A project of that scope has more than enough backlog to work through; what possible benefit could there be in putzing around internally with ideas for stuff that hasn't been codified by any relevant user groups, standards bodies, experts, national standards, etc? If they think that they have free time for that, they probably aren't looking hard enough at the stew of natural languages and commonly used symbols out there.

The original round of unicode-ified emoji, while puerile and obnoxious, were at least a solid instance of one of the Consortium's functions: the symbols were in wide use; but saddled with a horrible mess of legacy encoding schemes and general awfulness, so the only thing to do was wade in, hand out code points, and hope that the legacy systems could be burned to the ground as soon as possible. Same reason why parts of Unicode have substantial amounts of duplication, single characters that should be represented as composites, and so on; because various legacy standards had to die.

Here, though, there is no obvious existing standard being modeled on, nor any interoperability issue being solved. If somebody wants Unicode to have a picture of absolutely everything; maybe they should go work on graphics format standards.

Re:There was a point where Unicode needed to stop

[ShanghaiBill]

And they have clearly passed it.

Standards should formalize existing, established practices. They should not make stuff up and hope people like it. These allegycons should be implemented as image icons, and if people adopt them, and they are shown to be useful, then, and only then, should they be considered for incorporation into the standard. We don't need another trigraph debacle.

I hate hieroglyphics

[Geoffrey.landis]

I hate decyphering hieroglyphics. I propose that the unicode for "I have peanut allergies" should be the text string "I have peanut allergies."

Re:Food Allergies

[sphealey]

There is a also the third factor: where people who do not have life-threatening allergies, particularly life-threatening allergies to nuts, develop an attitude that (1) such immune system allergies really don't exist (2) those who claim they do, or who experience anaphylactic reactions to foodstuffs are (a) lying (b) morally weak.

I've seen people with that attitude try to push peanut butter cupcakes on 3-year-olds with severe peanut allergies. Oddly they are never very happy to be educated on their ignorance or its source, their attitude.

sPh

Do it in Kanji [Re:I hate hieroglyphics]

[Geoffrey.landis]

Simple. When you're in Germany, write it it German. If you're in China, write it in Chinese.

Did I mention I hate hieroglyphics?

The idea that we can create a universal language that everybody will understand by abandoning language and simply making a recognizable symbol for every single concept that anybody might ever want to communicate is stupid.

However, if that actually is your proposal, there is a simple solution: let's write everything in Chinese characters. They already did that. And if you don't think that Chinese characters work as universally recognizable symbols, well, that's just your western-centric prejudice. They've evolved those characters for thousands of years; you're pretty arrogant to think you can do better in a decade or two.

The problem with pictograms

[msobkow]

The problem with pictograms is they don't mean squat to someone who doesn't already know what they mean. If that weren't the case, Egyptian Hieroglyphics would still be in active use...