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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?
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.
I can't stand them. They offer very little real world value to anyone other than the slackjawed consumers content to rub on their phones all day.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Emojis are clip art for millennials.
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.
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.
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.
If you can't read, then Emojis wont help.
If we want a pictogram language, then to hell with Emojis and icons, lets use Kanji - it has been tested over 4,000 years, works, and more than half the world is already using it.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
This. This sums up the whole thing.
WTF are emojis doing in unicode in the first place? They're not typographic characters. They're not from a language. There is nothing about them that makes it a good idea to put them into unicode.
Emojis are just an extension of smileys, which we've all been using for the last 20 years or more. We never needed them in unicode before, so what's changed?
Sure, put them into a font if you must, if that really makes them easier for you to render, but don't waste time and effort cramming them into unicode space. We've had dingbat fonts for decades as well; what makes emojis any different from those?
Not only that, but many of the chosen emojis are just idiotic beyond belief.
Well yeah. But that's what you get when you let teenagers decide. (because they did; the emojis that were formally chosen are basically the ones that were in popular use at the time, ie largely by teenage text/twitter fans)
And this thing with racial variants of emojis is ridiculous.
Ridiculous, yes. Surprising? No.
But it's another solid argument for why the whole thing was a bad idea in the first place.
Emoji are image macros. The old saying that a picture is worth 1000 words is true, and while an emoji might only be worth 5 or 10 it's still handy to have. The most obvious example is the smiley, which indicates something that could otherwise be misinterpreted is said in jest.
I'm surprised how much hostility geeks have to emoji. We invented the damn things, with things like :-) and ASCII art and Shift-JIS art in Japan. Emoji characters just make them easier to type.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC