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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?

12 of 226 comments (clear)

  1. And people want to bring this bullshit to /.?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:And people want to bring this bullshit to /.?! by Austerity+Empowers · · Score: 5, Funny

      I would like to mod this with the poop emoji.

    2. Re:And people want to bring this bullshit to /.?! by JoshuaZ · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. No need to fight by Citizen+of+Earth · · Score: 4, Informative

    There's plenty of free code points for both dead languages and emojis.

    1. Re:No need to fight by AmiMoJo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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
  3. Re:Science Fiction is the Prediction! by negRo_slim · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
  4. Emojis by sexconker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Emojis are clip art for millennials.

  5. 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?

  6. Re:Science Fiction is the Prediction! by seyyah · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Re:Dejavu all over again by GTRacer · · Score: 4, Funny

    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!
  8. Emojis are useful, but Unicode goes too far by Todd+Knarr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  9. Don't Fear The Emoji. by westlake · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.