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Inside 'Emojigeddon': The Fight Over The Future Of The Unicode Consortium (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report on Buzzfeed: There's trouble afoot inside the Emoji Council of Elders, or, at the very least, signs of a low-simmering schism that's being referred to by some of its participants -- perhaps with less humor than one might expect -- as "Emojigeddon." A series of frustrated emails show a deepening rift between those who adhere to the organization's original mission to code old and obscure and minority languages and those who are investing time and resources toward Unicode's newer and most popular character sets: emojis. From the article: "The correspondence offers a peek behind the scenes of the peculiar and little-known organization that's unexpectedly been tasked with building what some see as the first digital universal language." What are your thoughts of emojis? Have you embraced and intertwined them into your digital language or are you unconvinced of their ability to transcribe any kind of deep understanding?
I like them because they remind me of the glyphs that they used to communicate in The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson.
Whenever we discuss possible improvements to Slashdot, somebody always comes along and begs for Unicode support.
This submission just goes to show that Unicode support is not a good thing, and it is not needed here.
Slashdot should not become another Twitter or YouTube, with comments filled with goddamn emojis.
Slashdot should absolutely not allow itself to become filled with Chinese or Russian spam comments, either.
As an English-oriented site, anything that needs to be expressed here can be done using ISO-8859-1, and even that's pushing it.
There is no need for Unicode here at Slashdot.
There's plenty of free code points for both dead languages and emojis.
You are now aware that emojis are the epitome of Orwellian language neutering.
[we’re] cutting the language down to the bone . . . Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year
"It's a beautiful thing, the Destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word, which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good,’ for instance. If you have a word like ‘good,’ what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well – better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good,’ what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words – in reality, only one word. Don't you see the beauty of that, Winston? It was B.B.'s idea originally, of course," he added as an afterthought.
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
By 2050, earlier, probably – all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron – they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like ‘freedom is slavery’ when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
I like how the Unicode standard just ignores the huge problem of combining CJK characters into one big mess. That way you can't tell the difference between completely different languages. It would be like someone saying, hey.. you know what? E and A sound similar, sometimes... so let's just combine those to save some space....after all, we only need to use 640K of RAM for everything....
Emojis are clip art for millennials.
Are we moving back to replacing words with pictures? Has Chinese been the right way all along?
Emoji is for illiterate imbeciles who lack the skill to express themselves with text - or, at most, text-based emoticons.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Because they are doing a pretty crap job on both accounts. But hey, thanks for the tiger vs leopard emojis. That distinction is going to come in handy for sure. And let me tell you there's nothing like having to reprogram a backspace key so it knows how to delete a multi-unit vs a one unit UNICODE character. Fun times!
:T:R:A:N:S:
This sounds like Japanese and Chinese all over again. Instead of having a relatively small keyboard and typing speeds with 3 digits per minute for words we can have emoji based keyboards with 10,000 keys and typing speeds of around 3 characters per minute.
I remember when the "universal" solution of icons and international symbols were going to solve everything wrong with words. Now we have a huge number of both that no matter what language you think in you don't know what the darn thing means. Everyone will be equally confused.
Learning Latin would be better.
I vote Esperanto.
I have watched my sister consistently spend more time trying to find 'just the right emoji' for a message than it took to type the message.
Emojis need to go the way of geocities, real media, and flash. The sooner the better.
I've been a little worried about the Unicode Consortium ever since 'PILE OF POO' (U+1F4A9) received its own codepoint. Don't know what's going on with those folks, but it doesn't seem healthy. Given that Unicode is an important and widely used standard, it seems like perhaps they should take their work a little more seriously. Or have they already 'JUMP THE SHARK'ed?
Seriously, buzzfeed? I'd rather hear from Our Frequent Contributor than see a ./ story that sources buzzfeed.
:)
Isn't the mark of a good design how LITTLE it has in it? I mean, if we're going to start adding icons and pictographs, then where do we draw the line? We can easily end up exhausting the remaining codepoints and bloating up fonts needlessly with this nonsense. Isn't this what images are for, rather than fonts?
blow and so do the people that use them.
No comment to the tears of joy smiley, i think you cannot fix it. But the default set from whatsapp (which refuses to respect android's emojis) even ruin basic smileys like big grin or laughing. One of the android manufactures had a nice set, not sure which one, one of htc/samsung/lg i think. But iOS and Google both have not so good ones and even twitter (which gets some better) has smileys where the original meaning gets lost.
If Slashdot supported Unicode, I'd have to reply by saying U+E115 U+1F988
The original set of emojis worked nicely for incorporating emotional and attitude markers into otherwise emotionless text. I think we do need something like that in Unicode. The current set, though, goes way too far beyond that and needs to be mercilessly pruned back. Unicode is not supposed to be a way to incorporate every single image anyone could want as a single character. Trim it back and use images for images. To quote someone, "If you're trying to design a hammer that can turn screws, it's time for you to put the hammer down and go get a screwdriver.". OK, it's not an exact quote, but I can't do justice to the interspersed expletives in the original.
As far as "wasting time", it seems to me, without any inside knowledge, that it should be simple enough to have an emoji committee, which does most of the emoji work separate from anyone who doesn't care to be involved in that aspect.
There is plenty of room in Unicode for both the consortium's original mission and for emojis, or any other type of character that may emerge over time. No character so far has been unfairly excluded: The existing rules have worked well, and Unicode itself works well for both programmers who have done their homework and for users.
If you're having problems with Unicode then you should join me in programming all modern day receipt printers. (*) They still use Code Page 437, which was created in 1981 or earlier. Almost every business that uses a computerized cash register has at least one of these devices, and to the people who have to program them the beauty of Unicode is oh so evident. Unicode replaces decades of ugly hacks, beginning with CP437.
I think the problem might be that the members of the consortium are a bit overworked and underappreciated for their efforts. After all, they're doing work that impacts billions of lives. Unicode has made our software automatically portable to virtually every language (aside from the receipt printer which can only very easily do Western languages and perhaps Japanese or Chinese).
(*) The latest receipt printers are catching up with the times, but you can't code to those exclusively or you'll break your installed base.
I prefer the term "digital cave paintings"
There are several ways to send emoji, and I wouldn't be surprised if one or more of these is actually being done today:
* Create a very large, expandable globally-unique-ID-like emoji-lookup service that's open to anyone: You want to use a made-up emoji or symbol or arbitrary image? You register it with a central authority, who gives you a globally-unique ID. When you want to use it, you send the globally-unique-ID as the "character" in your text message. If the recipient doesn't have it cached, it looks it up before displaying it. Fonts won't matter, since it's a single image, not a "letter."
* For suitably-small images, just transmit the image in-line with the message. Sure, that will turn just about every text into a multi-media-message but hey, at least the recipient won't be displaying the wrong thing and he won't be dependent on a central look-up database.
Combine these two approaches:
* When you send a text with emojis you've never sent or received before, you create your own "I hope it's globally unique" ID based on the current time and a hash of the emoji and some randomness. Then, when you send the message, you send both the "hopefully globally unique ID" AND the hash where the image will be instead of the image, then you append the actual image or images to the end of the message. The second time you send a message using the same emojis (or any time someone who has ever received that emoji re-sends it), you re-use the "hopefully globally unique ID" and the hash from before. If the recipient has received the emoji in an earlier message (from you or from someone else who got it from you originally), they will have it cached and will be able to display it without having to wait for the images to be received. You get the speed of not having to send the images, the reliability you get when you send the images, and you aren't dependent on any central authority. You run the very small risk of an accidental hash collision and the maybe-not-so-small risk of a deliberate one.
Save Unicode for actual characters.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
is "The Finger"
The rest is complete waste of time and needs to die.
Just make one represent another tree, anyone stuck is dead.
I am asking for the count of all the possible valid combinations in Unicode with explanation.
1,111,998: 17 planes x 65,536 characters per plane - 2048 surrogates - 66 noncharacters
109,384 code points are actually assigned in Unicode 6.0.
How many characters can be mapped with Unicode?
There is plenty of room for growth here.
Unicode 8 supports 120 scripts and 14 collections of other symbols of which Emoji is one and typographical decorations --- dingbats --- another. Once you admit that a Unicode graphic can be purposeful, decorative or both, the battle against the admission of Emoji is lost. U 9.0 and Post 9.0 Emoji Candidates
Emoji is explicitly Asian in origin --- and that seems to be one of things ticking off the geek here --- but combining words and pictures in casual messaging to provide a touch of color or save some space is very old in the Western world, and doesn't really need a defense.
The geek who complains about this sort of thing tends to come across as humorless and prissy and a bit out of touch.
They are rendered differently on different OSes and even phones from different vendors. :-/ conveys the same emotion no matter what font it's in.
I had a cool text based graphic to post as a comment to this article.
Too bad Slashdot's "Junk Character" filter did not permit it to be posted.
What a bunch of weenies. (I''ve got a good text graphic for that too!)
As time goes by, I am coming to regard the movie Idiocracy as a glimpse into our future.
fuck unicode. fuck utf8. if god wanted us to use anything but 7 bit ascii, he'd have created the emoji stupidity 20 years ago...oh wait, the aol fucktards were already doing it. fucktards.
Unicode has no business whatsoever integrating emojis. If an independent consortium of hardware and/or software makers want to agree on a standard, interoperable set of emojis to include with their hardware/software, that is fine.
Not only that, but many of the chosen emojis are just idiotic beyond belief. And this thing with racial variants of emojis is ridiculous.
Cutesy little pictographs may depict gross emotional states, but getting any kind of refined and accurate communication from such things would be an exercise in futility as they currently stand.
Cave paintings are art.
As far as "wasting time", it seems to me, without any inside knowledge, that it should be simple enough to have an emoji committee, which does most of the emoji work separate from anyone who doesn't care to be involved in that aspect.
There is plenty of address space, sure. But isn't the real problem time and money, of which there aren't unlimited amounts of each. In a perfect world, have two groups and let each do whatever the fuck they want to do. Anything created that people think is stupid will just get ignored and abandon, no harm no foul.
I suspect though that someone has to pay these jerk wads to make emoji standards, and that isn't ok, at least until we have all the real languages and Klingon, Elvish, Zentraedi, and whatever other pointless nerd jibberish squared away.
Then we can make the stupid pictographs for illiterate millennials.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
... it draws attention from, for example, this mess: http://www.unicode.org/reports...
Did you know that you cannot compare strings in Unicode?
Or well, I suppose there are 3 living people who understand that.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Then why not Unicode representations for different types of snow, sexual positions, fast food menu items, famous buildings, unfamous buildings, every species of bat, all the people who've ever lived and every word in every dictionary? They all deserve their place in Unicode for the same dubious reasons as emojis.
We're just going to see hundreds of posts like:
U+xxxx U+xxxx U+xxxx
Watch this Heartland Institute video
I call bullshit !
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/1f4a9/index.htm
Ah, now I realise that this is a Buttfeed article. I can't really imagine there would be any serious conflict about whether to include emojis or not; the Unicode Consortium are a bit more seriousminded than that. What I can imangine is that those who care about standardising emojis want to bring it up in the committee meetings, and the rest go "Groan... Whatever", because it isn't really something of huge importance. Whether there is a standard character for dogshit probably seems of less scientific importance to many than how to encode Sumerian cuneiform or how many places to leave for CJK characters.
Emojis are the 21st-century equivalent of the "blink" tag. They should be restricted to Geocities web sites.
...why not focus on the fact that even on the most current OS of your preference, a lot of Unicode shows up as dominoes/glyphs instead of the proper character. Lets make Unicode actually work universally before adding frilly crap, eh?
Could the problem be that that the Unicode consortium's mission is complete? Much like any organization, once your goal is complete you don't depart and say "Okay, good job everyone!" Instead, you start making up worthless features until you destroy the simplicity and elegance of what you created. (cough...Firefox...ahem...Thunderbird...)
Patent #25344564334323-2 : Draw pictures on a cave wall, on a computer.
Patent #5034543958934453 : Draw pictures on a cave wall, on a computer.