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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.
There's plenty of free code points for both dead languages and emojis.
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
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?
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?
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.
s/phones/tablets/ and that's pretty much what Amenemhat said to Khnumhotep in 2650 BC.
:)
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.
Huh? Japanese (and I assume Chinese) typists don't need monster keyboards. Standard 104-key units will do, assuming the OS taking in the keys provides a simple IME/autocomplete dictionary. I've typed in Japanese using romaji , rendering a mix of Kanji and kana far faster than 3 characters per minute.
.
/.
Just in case you're interested, using such an IME, you type watashi and at first you get , then space move through Kanji matches, and I stop on
Aaaand now I see the need for Unicode support on
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
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.
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 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.
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.