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?

Comments

And people want to bring this bullshit to /.?!

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:And people want to bring this bullshit to /.?!

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Really? I had a discussion a while ago with another user about an article related to the death penalty about whether the Ten Commandents have a command that should be better translated as "Do not murder" or "Do not kill." That was substantially difficult to do with having to transliterate everything. Similarly, there have been discussions here about the exact Chinese censorship rules and what specific phrases meant, which people had to discuss without actually quoting the actual text. These are just two of the examples I've seen here. I suspect that others can point out many more. Yes, supporting Unicode might mean that there will be emojis on occasion, and they'll get downmodded. They aren't any worse than comments calling everyone cows or whatever the most recent trolling fad is.

Re:Science Fiction is the Prediction!

[negRo_slim]

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.

Emojis

[sexconker]

Emojis are clip art for millennials.

Is there an Emoji for DIAF?

[Tehrasha]

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.

Emojis are useful, but Unicode goes too far

[Todd Knarr]

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.

Don't Fear The Emoji.

[westlake]

This query to stackoverflow is four years old, but that doesn't really change things very much.

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.

Re:No need to fight

[AmiMoJo]

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.