Asmus Freytag wrote as follows.
Just because a select group of people engages in communication about the arcane details of a proposed specification it doesn't mean that the outcome will benefit some entirely different and larger group communicate better.
This is logically true. However the same could have been said about people discussing the details of the then proposed Unicode specification over a quarter of a century ago, wanting to use 16 bits for each character used in ordinary English instead of just 8 bits. Yet Unicode has benefitted many many people around the world who may not know much about the underlying theory and technology.
I looked up the word 'arcane' and I opine that the details of the QID emoji proposal are not arcane. They are clear and available free to view, without registration, on the internet.
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/arcane https://www.unicode.org/review/pri408/
There's too much of the "might possibly" about this; …
It provides and opportunity for progress.
... and it is quite different from the early days of Unicode itself, where there was a groundswell of pent-up demand for a solution to the fragmented character encoding landscape; the discussions quickly became about the best way to do that, and about how to ensure that the result would be supported.
Yes, fine, and a good job was done and has benefitted many many people around the world. That was then and that was how things happened then for that situation. Now is now and this is a different approach for a different situation.
The current effort starts from an unrelated problem (Unicode not wanting to administer emoji applications) and in my analysis, seriously puts the cart before the horse.
Well I was not aware of that purported reason, but then I am not part of the inner loop so you may well therefore have more information about the motivation than is accessible to me.
William Overington Wednesday 13 November 2019
