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Inside 'Emojigeddon': The Fight Over The Future Of The Unicode Consortium (buzzfeed.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the swirling,-smiling-pile-of-poop dept.

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?

2 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. Are we devolving back to hieroglyphics? by jfdavis668 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Are we moving back to replacing words with pictures? Has Chinese been the right way all along?

  2. Re:Emojis are useful, but Unicode goes too far by tlhIngan · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    And it's not. The reason we have emoji in Unicode should be obvious from the name. The origin of emoji was in Japan, and one of Unicode's goals is to be able to encode all text. So they're incorporating various languages alphabets, then they come across Japanese and put in Kanji. Then they discover that their phones have been sending pictures and had to incorporate those into Unicode. Then they discovered every carrier started having a similar thing but different and had to incorporate those as well. And they've been in Unicode for a while.

    Then a silly fruit company had to release a phone, initially in the US, but then also in Japan. But because they were in Japan, they had to add support for this as well. Then a non-Japanese user discovered with a hack they could type poops and such as well, and started sending their friends poops. And their friends wondered how it was done, installed those hacks, and now what was a Japan-only feature was now world-accessible.

    And now everyone decided they want their own set of what we now called emojis.

    Which meant Unicode now had to incorporate them in order to fulfill its mission to be able to encode every text in it.