Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Marcel Schneider via Unicode]

On Sun, 18 Feb 2018 20:06:42 +, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
[…]
> Unicode also avoids text that is 'wrong' but still comprehensible.
> 

Unicode should then legalize the use of preformatted superscripts in Latin 
script. 
This convention appears to root back in medieval Latin, for which Unicode have 
added all required superscripts. Interoperable digital representation of modern 
languages may differ in policies, but it does not in principles.

As of practice, a sample layout provides access to all existing small 
superscript
Latin base letters on live key positions:
http://charupdate.info/doc/kbenintu/#N

The 'ᵗʰ' sequence is on key E12, level 1B (with AltGr/Option):
http://charupdate.info/doc/kbenintu/#B

And a ‹Superscript› dead key is on key C02 [S].


Regards,

Märcel

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Sat, 17 Feb 2018 22:31:12 -0800
James Kass via Unicode  wrote:

> It's true that added features can make for a better presentation.
> Removing the special features shouldn't alter the message.

I think I've encountered the use of italics in novels for sotto voce or
asides.

> The Unicode Standard draws the line between minimal legibility and
> special features.  Emoji are in The Standard and have, therefore, been
> determined to be required for minimal legibility.

That is a fuzzy boundary, as is evidenced by the optional effects of ZWJ
and ZWNJ in most scripts and variation sequences (all scripts).
Unicode also avoids text that is 'wrong' but still comprehensible.

Richard.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Christoph Päper wrote,

> Stuff like typography or emoji can improve the
> effectiveness and efficiency of textual communication
> a lot.

"Given that rich text equals plain text plus added information, the
extra information in rich text can be stripped away to reveal the
"pure" text underneath."

"Plain text must contain enough information to permit the text to be
rendered legibly and nothing more."

"The Unicode Standard encodes plain text."

(Above quotes from The Unicode Standard 5.0, pages 18 and 19)

It's true that added features can make for a better presentation.
Removing the special features shouldn't alter the message.

The Unicode Standard draws the line between minimal legibility and
special features.  Emoji are in The Standard and have, therefore, been
determined to be required for minimal legibility.  If the emoji
repertoire expands and Unicode does not include the new emoji, then
Unicode cannot be depended upon to exchange legible textual data.  The
addition of more emoji to Unicode is inevitable.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Marcel Schneider via Unicode]

On 17/02/18 13:43, Christoph Päper via Unicode wrote:
[…] 
> Stuff like typography or emoji can improve the effectiveness and efficiency
> of textual communication a lot. (And if used badly or maliciously they can
> deter it as well.)
> 

Since poor typography can deteriorate our communication as well, what people 
need is also a keyboard layout that can be left on all the time while giving 
access 
to what we need, in a straightforward manner. Here weʼll get the letter 
apostrophe, 
curly quotes, along with acute accent, tilde, diaeresis/umlaut in the Base 
shift state:

http://charupdate.info/doc/kbenintu/

As already mailed to CLDR-Users, feedback is always welcome.

http://unicode.org/pipermail/cldr-users/2018-February/000737.html

Regards,

Marcel

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Christoph Päper via Unicode]

James Kass:
> Asmus Freytag wrote:
> 
>>> Words suffice.  We go by what people actually say rather than whatever
>>> they might have meant.  When we read text, we go by what's written.
>
>> That is a worthy opinion, but not one that is shared, either in principle
>> or in lived practice (...) by vast numbers of people.
> 
> True, but there are also plenty of people who strive to say what they
> mean and mean what they say.

It's astonishing how you apparently ignore how human communication actually 
works. We are not machines where the Shannon-Weaver model of a message encoded 
by the sender and accurately decoded by the receiver applies (with some 
correction for errors induced by noise in the transmission channel). 
Communication, even written, is a very complex process that involves a lot of 
unspoken assumptions and external knowledge on all sides. Words do not suffice. 
We do not go simply by what's written. Stuff like typography or emoji can 
improve the effectiveness and efficiency of textual communication a lot. (And 
if used badly or maliciously they can deter it as well.)

IDC's versus Egyptian format controls (was: Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?)

[Ken Whistler via Unicode]

On 2/16/2018 8:00 AM, Richard Wordingham via Unicode wrote:


A more portable solution for ideographs is to render an Ideographic
Description Sequences (IDS) as approximations to the characters they
describe.  The Unicode Standard carefully does not prohibit so doing,
and a similar scheme is being developed for blocks of Egyptian
Hieroglyphs, and has been proposed for Mayan as well.


A point of clarification: The IDC's (ideographic description characters) 
are explicitly *not* format controls. They are visible graphic symbols 
that sit visibly in text. There is a specified syntax for stringing them 
together into sequences with ideographic characters and radicals to 
*suggest* a specific form of CJK (or other ideographic) character 
assembled from the pieces in a certain order -- but there is no 
implication that a generic text layout process *should* attempt to 
assemble that described character as a single glyph. IDC's are a 
*description* methodology. IDC's are General_Category=So.


The Egyptian quadrat controls, on the other hand, are full-fledged 
Unicode format controls. They do not just describe hieroglyphic quadrats 
-- they are intended to be implemented in text format software and 
OpenType fonts to actually construct and display fully-formed quadrats 
on the fly. They will be General_Category=Cf. Mayan will work in a 
similar manner, although the specification of the sign list and exact 
required set of format controls is not yet as mature as that for Egyptian.


--Ken

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2018 10:57:57 +
Phake Nick via Unicode  wrote:

> 2. Actually, the problem is not just limited to emoji. Many
> Ideographic characters (Chinese, Japanese, etc) are adding to the
> unicode each years, while at the current rate there are still many
> rooms in Unicode standard to contain them, it's still more open-ended
> than would be desired for a multilingual encoding system, and the it
> also make it hard to expect newly encoded ideographic characters to
> just "work" on different system with sufficient font support.

Isn't Unicode designed to stifle innovation?  -:)

Actually, there are two mechanisms that could be made to support
innovations.  For characters with limited dissemination, one can revert
to a font-based mechanism that defines properties for graphical PUA
characters.  The problem is that that won't work at all well in plain
text like this email.  I thought a specialised version of the scheme was
already working for Japanese names - PUAs started as a temporary
extension measure for CJK encodings.

A more portable solution for ideographs is to render an Ideographic
Description Sequences (IDS) as approximations to the characters they
describe.  The Unicode Standard carefully does not prohibit so doing,
and a similar scheme is being developed for blocks of Egyptian
Hieroglyphs, and has been proposed for Mayan as well.  There may be
merit in making the rendering of an IDs ugly, so as to encourage its
replacement by the encoding of the character.  I gather that making the
use of IDSes consistent with searching is considered daunting.

Richard.

 

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Phake Nick via Unicode]

2018-02-16 FRI 15:55, James Kass via Unicode  wrote:

> Pierpaolo Bernardi wrote:
>
> > But it's always a good time to argue against the addition of more
> > nonsense to what we already have got.
>
> It's an open-ended set and precedent for encoding them exists.
> Generally, input regarding the addition of characters to a repertoire
> is solicited from the user community, of which I am not a member.
>
> My personal feeling is that all of the time, effort, and money spent
> by the various corporations in promoting the emoji into Unicode would
> have been better directed towards something more worthwhile, such as
> the unencoded scripts listed at:
>
>  http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/scripts-not-encoded.html
>
> ... but nobody asked me.
>

1. In UTS #51, it have been mentioned that embedded graphic is the way to
go as a longer term solution to emoji, in addition to emoji characters. But
then that would requires substantial infrastructure changes, and even then
in pure text environment they would most probably not be supported.

2. Actually, the problem is not just limited to emoji. Many Ideographic
characters (Chinese, Japanese, etc) are adding to the unicode each years,
while at the current rate there are still many rooms in Unicode standard to
contain them, it's still more open-ended than would be desired for a
multilingual encoding system, and the it also make it hard to expect newly
encoded ideographic characters to just "work" on different system with
sufficient font support. The situation that a character have to be encoded
into Unicode before they can be exchanged digitally have also limited
activities by users in term of creating new characters in ad hoc manner,
which is something that would probably happen in pre-digital era more
often. Different parties have proposed some solutions to dynamically
construct and use these characters as desired instead of relying on an
encoding mechanism but then they all seems to be so radically different
from modern computer infrastructure that they are not being adopted.

>

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Mark Davis ☕️ via Unicode]

A few points

1. To add to what Asmus said, see also
http://unicode.org/L2/L2018/18044-encoding-emoji.pdf

"Their encoding, surprisingly, has been a boon for language support. The
emoji draw on Unicode
mechanisms that are used by various languages, but which had been
incompletely implemented on
many platforms. Because of the demand for emoji, many implementations have
upgraded their
Unicode support substantially. That means that implementations now have far
better support for the
languages that use the more complicated Unicode mechanisms."

An example of that is MySQL, where the rise of emoji led to non-BMP support.


2. Aside from SEI (at UCB), we've also been able to fund a number of
projects such as
http://blog.unicode.org/2016/12/adopt-character-grant-to-support-indic.html


4. Finally, I'd like to point out that this external mailing list is open
to anyone (subject to civil behavior), with the main goal being to provide
a forum for people to ask questions about how to deploy, use, and
contribute to Unicode, and get answers from a community of users.

Those who want to engage in extended kvetching can take that to the
rightful place: *Twitter*.

Mark






Mark

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 9:25 AM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode <
unicode@unicode.org> wrote:

> On 2/15/2018 11:54 PM, James Kass via Unicode wrote:
>
> Pierpaolo Bernardi wrote:
>
>
> But it's always a good time to argue against the addition of more
> nonsense to what we already have got.
>
> It's an open-ended set and precedent for encoding them exists.
> Generally, input regarding the addition of characters to a repertoire
> is solicited from the user community, of which I am not a member.
>
> My personal feeling is that all of the time, effort, and money spent
> by the various corporations in promoting the emoji into Unicode would
> have been better directed towards something more worthwhile, such as
> the unencoded scripts listed at:
>
>  http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/scripts-not-encoded.html
>
> ... but nobody asked me.
>
>
> Curiously enough it is the emoji that keep a large number of users (and
> companies
> serving them) engaged with Unicode who would otherwise be likely to come
> to the conclusion that Unicode is "done" as far as their needs are
> concerned.
>
> Few, if any, of the not-yet-encoded scripts are used by large living
> populations,
> therefore they are not urgently missing / needed in daily life and are of
> interest
> primarily to specialists.
>
> Emoji are definitely up-ending that dynamic, which I would argue is a good
> thing.
>
> A financially well endowed Consortium with strong membership is a
> prerequisite
> to fulfilling the larger cultural mission of Unicode. Sure, for the
> populations
> whose scripts are already encoded, there are separate issues that will keep
> some interest alive, like solving problems related to algorithms and
> locales, but
> also dealing with extensions of existing scripts and notational systems -
> although
> few enough of those are truly urgent/widely used.
>
> The University of Berkeley people would be the first to tell you how their
> funding
> puncture is positively influenced by the current perceived relevancy of
> the Unicode
> Consortium - much of it being due to those emoji.
>
> A./
>
>
>
>

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Asmus Freytag wrote:

>> Words suffice.  We go by what people actually say rather than whatever
>> they might have meant.  When we read text, we go by what's written.
>
> That is a worthy opinion, but not one that is shared, either in principle
> or in lived practice (esp. related to digital communication) by vast numbers
> of people.

True, but there are also plenty of people who strive to say what they
mean and mean what they say.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Asmus Freytag via Unicode]

  
  
On 2/15/2018 11:54 PM, James Kass via
  Unicode wrote:


  Pierpaolo Bernardi wrote:


  
But it's always a good time to argue against the addition of more
nonsense to what we already have got.

  
  
It's an open-ended set and precedent for encoding them exists.
Generally, input regarding the addition of characters to a repertoire
is solicited from the user community, of which I am not a member.

My personal feeling is that all of the time, effort, and money spent
by the various corporations in promoting the emoji into Unicode would
have been better directed towards something more worthwhile, such as
the unencoded scripts listed at:

 http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/scripts-not-encoded.html

... but nobody asked me.



Curiously enough it is the emoji that keep a
large number of users (and companies
serving them) engaged with Unicode who would otherwise be likely
to come
to the conclusion that Unicode is "done" as far as their needs
are concerned.
Few, if any, of the not-yet-encoded scripts
are used by large living populations,
therefore they are not urgently missing / needed in daily life
and are of interest
primarily to specialists.
Emoji are definitely up-ending that dynamic,
which I would argue is a good thing.
A financially well endowed Consortium with
strong membership is a prerequisite
to fulfilling the larger cultural mission of Unicode. Sure, for
the populations
whose scripts are already encoded, there are separate issues
that will keep
some interest alive, like solving problems related to algorithms
and locales, but
also dealing with extensions of existing scripts and notational
systems - although
few enough of those are truly urgent/widely used.
The University of Berkeley people would be
the first to tell you how their funding
puncture is positively influenced by the current perceived relevancy
of the Unicode
Consortium - much of it being due to those emoji.
A./
  


  
  

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Asmus Freytag via Unicode]

Words suffice.  We go by what people actually say rather than whatever
they might have meant.  When we read text, we go by what's written.


That is a worthy opinion, but not one that is shared, either in principle
or in lived practice (esp. related to digital communication) by vast numbers
of people.

One of the strengths of Unicode has always been its willingness to deal with
actual use of writing and notational systems - sometimes after a bit of 
a delay.


In other words, Unicode is rarely prescriptive, unless positive 
interchange isn't

possible otherwise. And that reactiveness is a good thing, as much as the
result can look a bit "messy" at times and time and again refuses to fit a
nice single conceptual framework.

A./

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Pierpaolo Bernardi wrote:

> But it's always a good time to argue against the addition of more
> nonsense to what we already have got.

It's an open-ended set and precedent for encoding them exists.
Generally, input regarding the addition of characters to a repertoire
is solicited from the user community, of which I am not a member.

My personal feeling is that all of the time, effort, and money spent
by the various corporations in promoting the emoji into Unicode would
have been better directed towards something more worthwhile, such as
the unencoded scripts listed at:

 http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/scripts-not-encoded.html

... but nobody asked me.

Re: End of discussion, please — Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Anshuman Pandey wrote:

> I think it’s a good time to end this conversation. Whether ‘nonsense’ or not,
> emoji are here and they’re in Unicode. This conversation has itself become
> nonsense, d’y’all agree?

No.  Other than the part about emoji being here and in Unicode.

> The amount of time that people have spent on this discussion could’ve been
> directed towards work on any one of the unencoded scripts listed at:
>
>  http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/scripts-not-encoded.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_work_and_no_play_makes_Jack_a_dull_boy

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Phake Nick via Unicode]

2018-02-16 10:46, "James Kass"  wrote

Phake Nick wrote,

> By the standard of "if one can't string word together that speak for
> themselves can use otger media", then we can scrap Unicode and simply use
> voice recording for all the purposes. →_→

Not for me, I can still type faster than I can talk.  Besides, voice
recordings are all about communicating by stringing words together.


There are thousands of situations where one would want to express something
in text form instead of voice form other than to be fast. Voice
communication isn't just about communicating "string of words" together.
Emotion and any other rhibgs are also transferred. That's also why carriers
are supporting HQ Voice transmission over telephony system for better
clarity in this aspect.


>> These are rhetorical questions.
>
> Tonal emoticon for telephone or voice transmission? There are tones for
> voice based transmission system
> And yes, there are limits in these technology which make teleconferencing
> still not all that popular and people still have to fly across the world
> just to attend all different sort of meetings.

At least, that's what they tell their accountants and tax people, right?

Then why do those people who pay for their own trip still do so?

> […]

2018-02-16 11:27, "James Kass via Unicode"  wrote:

If someone were to be smiling and shrugging while giving you the
finger, would you be smiling too?

Heck, I'd probably be laughing out loud while running for my life!
So, poor example.  OK.  A smiling creep is still a creep.

This is an example of extravocal communication. If the person was sayong
thankyou with smiling face while giving you a middle finger, it would be
totally different context from a regular thank you goven by other people.


Suppose for a moment that you and I are pals in the same room having a
face-to-face conversation.  I advise you that, due to unforeseen
events, I'm a bit financially strapped and could use a spot of cash to
sort of tide me over until my ship comes into orbit.  You smile and
nod your head while saying "no".  Which response applies?

Words suffice.  We go by what people actually say rather than whatever
they might have meant.  When we read text, we go by what's written.

Then, what would be the feeling of the listener if he onky hear you say no
but didn't know about your facial and body reaction? They might not be able
to grasp the pevep of no you are giving out, and you would want to use some
rather lengthy description to explain to the person why you want to reject
him. Why do that when a simple non-verbal expression is enough?

An inability to communicate any essential feelings and overtones using
words is not a gross failure of either language or writing.  It's more
about the skill levels of the speaker, listener, author, and reader.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonverbal_communication


As for the thread title question, perhaps the exchanges within the
thread offer insight.  Emoji exist and are interchanged.  Unicode
enables them to be interchanged in a standard fashion.  Even if
they're just for fun, frivolous, silly, and ephemeral.  Even if some
people consider them beyond the scope of The Unicode Standard.  The
best time to argue against the addition of emoji to Unicode would be
2007 or 2008, but you'd be wasting your time travel.  Trust me.

I would like to add that, if Unicode didn't include emoji at the time, then
I suspect many more systems will continue to use Shift-JIS instead.
Individual mobile phone carriers will continue to use each of their own
provate codepoints and app/platform developers either have to find a way to
convert between code point between different emoji being used (remember
implementation by each carriers don't strictly correspond to each other),
or invent yet another private use font to correspond to each of all those
emoji within their platform.

End of discussion, please — Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Anshuman Pandey via Unicode]

> On Feb 15, 2018, at 10:58 PM, Pierpaolo Bernardi via Unicode 
>  wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 4:26 AM, James Kass via Unicode
>  wrote:
> 
>> The best time to argue against the addition of emoji to Unicode would be
>> 2007 or 2008, but you'd be wasting your time travel.  Trust me.
> 
> But it's always a good time to argue against the addition of more
> nonsense to what we already have got.

I think it’s a good time to end this conversation. Whether ‘nonsense’ or not, 
emoji are here and they’re in Unicode. This conversation has itself become 
nonsense, d’y’all agree?

The amount of time that people have spent on this discussion could’ve been 
directed towards work on any one of the unencoded scripts listed at:

 http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/scripts-not-encoded.html

As many have noted during this discussion, the emoji “ship has already sailed”. 
I’d’ve jumped aboard sooner, but this metaphor is now also quite tired. 

All my best,
Anshu

+1 (was: Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?)

[Doug Ewell via Unicode]

Philippe Verdy wrote:


If people don't know how to read and cannot reuse the content and
transmit it, they become just consumers and in fact less and less
productors or creators of contents. Just look at opinions under
videos, most of them are just "thumbs up", "like", "+1", barely
counted only, unqualifiable (there's not even a thumb down).


+1 is actually a convenient shorthand when all that needs to be said is 
"I agree" or "me too" (especially now that the latter has taken on a 
highly charged meaning in the U.S.). It is especially popular in the 
IETF. It is not intended for situations that require explanation or 
details.


--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org 

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Pierpaolo Bernardi via Unicode]

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 4:26 AM, James Kass via Unicode
 wrote:

> The best time to argue against the addition of emoji to Unicode would be
> 2007 or 2008, but you'd be wasting your time travel.  Trust me.

But it's always a good time to argue against the addition of more
nonsense to what we already have got.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

If someone were to be smiling and shrugging while giving you the
finger, would you be smiling too?

Heck, I'd probably be laughing out loud while running for my life!
So, poor example.  OK.  A smiling creep is still a creep.

Suppose for a moment that you and I are pals in the same room having a
face-to-face conversation.  I advise you that, due to unforeseen
events, I'm a bit financially strapped and could use a spot of cash to
sort of tide me over until my ship comes into orbit.  You smile and
nod your head while saying "no".  Which response applies?

Words suffice.  We go by what people actually say rather than whatever
they might have meant.  When we read text, we go by what's written.
An inability to communicate any essential feelings and overtones using
words is not a gross failure of either language or writing.  It's more
about the skill levels of the speaker, listener, author, and reader.

As for the thread title question, perhaps the exchanges within the
thread offer insight.  Emoji exist and are interchanged.  Unicode
enables them to be interchanged in a standard fashion.  Even if
they're just for fun, frivolous, silly, and ephemeral.  Even if some
people consider them beyond the scope of The Unicode Standard.  The
best time to argue against the addition of emoji to Unicode would be
2007 or 2008, but you'd be wasting your time travel.  Trust me.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Phake Nick wrote,

> By the standard of "if one can't string word together that speak for
> themselves can use otger media", then we can scrap Unicode and simply use
> voice recording for all the purposes. →_→

Not for me, I can still type faster than I can talk.  Besides, voice
recordings are all about communicating by stringing words together.

>> These are rhetorical questions.
>
> Tonal emoticon for telephone or voice transmission? There are tones for
> voice based transmission system
> And yes, there are limits in these technology which make teleconferencing
> still not all that popular and people still have to fly across the world
> just to attend all different sort of meetings.

At least, that's what they tell their accountants and tax people, right?

> Emoji is part of the literacy. Remember that Japanese writing system use
> ideographic characters plus kana, it won't be odd to add yet another set of
> pictographic writing system in line to express what you don't want to spell
> out.

Yes, it's a done deal.  For better or for worse.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 6:19 PM, Phake Nick via Unicode
 wrote:
>
>
> 2018-02-16 04:55, "James Kass via Unicode"  wrote:
>
> Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,
>
>> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another
>> major hole in written communication -- the need to convey
>> emotional state and affective attitudes towards the text.
>
> There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which
> 'speak for themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that
> emoticons were invented for much the same reason that "typewriter art"
> was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's
> novel.
>
> By the standard of "if one can't string word together that speak for
> themselves can use otger media", then we can scrap Unicode and simply use
> voice recording for all the purposes. →_→
>
>
>> This is the kind of information that face-to-face
>> communication has a huge and evolutionarily deep
>> bandwidth for, but which written communication
>> typically fails miserably at.
>
> Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for
> telephone or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
> at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics
> and hand gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
> These are rhetorical questions.
>
> Tonal emoticon for telephone or voice transmission? There are tones for
> voice based transmission system
> And yes, there are limits in these technology which make teleconferencing
> still not all that popular and people still have to fly across the world
> just to attend all different sort of meetings.
>
>
> For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate
> age.  We already have people in positions of power who pride
> themselves on their marginal literacy and boast about the fact that
> they don't read much.  Sad!
>
> Emoji is part of the literacy. Remember that Japanese writing system use
> ideographic characters plus kana, it won't be odd to add yet another set of
> pictographic writing system in line to express what you don't want to spell
> out.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Phake Nick via Unicode]

2018-02-16 04:55, "James Kass via Unicode"  wrote:

Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,

> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another
> major hole in written communication -- the need to convey
> emotional state and affective attitudes towards the text.

There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which
'speak for themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that
emoticons were invented for much the same reason that "typewriter art"
was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's
novel.

By the standard of "if one can't string word together that speak for
themselves can use otger media", then we can scrap Unicode and simply use
voice recording for all the purposes. →_→


> This is the kind of information that face-to-face
> communication has a huge and evolutionarily deep
> bandwidth for, but which written communication
> typically fails miserably at.

Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for
telephone or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics
and hand gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
These are rhetorical questions.

Tonal emoticon for telephone or voice transmission? There are tones for
voice based transmission system
And yes, there are limits in these technology which make teleconferencing
still not all that popular and people still have to fly across the world
just to attend all different sort of meetings.


For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate
age.  We already have people in positions of power who pride
themselves on their marginal literacy and boast about the fact that
they don't read much.  Sad!

Emoji is part of the literacy. Remember that Japanese writing system use
ideographic characters plus kana, it won't be odd to add yet another set of
pictographic writing system in line to express what you don't want to spell
out.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Philippe Verdy wrote,

>>> And it's in the mission of Unicode, IMHO, to promote litteracy
>>
>> Um, no. And not even literacy, either. ;-)
>
> Oh well the 1 to 2 T is a minor English typo (there's 2 T in French for the
> similar word family, sorry).
>
> But I included "IMHO", which means that even if it's not official, it has
> been the motivating reason why various members joined the project ...

In this case the punctuation emoticon tacked onto Ken's message
apparently did little to diminish the sting of his correcting both
your spelling and your opinion.

Unicode's stated mission is more along the lines of ensuring that
computer text can be universally interchanged in a standard fashion.
As a tool, Unicode can be used to promote either literacy or
illiteracy.  It can be used to exchange messages of joy and love, or
hatred and despair.

I completely agree that promoting literacy and preserving texts has
been a motivating factor for many people supporting the project.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

Oh well the 1 to 2 T is a minor English typo (there's 2 T in French for the
similar word family, sorry).

But I included "IMHO", which means that even if it's not official, it has
been the motivating reason why various members joined the project and try
to put an end to the destruction of written languages and loss of our
written heritage which is still the essential way to communicate for the
humanity (much more than oral languages that are all threatened of rapid
death and being fogotten if it's not written). Written languages easily
cross the borders, the generations, the cultures, with it you can extend
your own language and culture, and get more ideas, more inventions, you
better understand the world, and you have the mean to be more creative, and
not follow only what the most visible leaders are saying. Everywhere,
literacy is improving people life and offers more means of living. And it
really helps preserving your own personal memory (you do that with
photos/videos or audio which are almost impossible to organize without
attaching text to it)!


2018-02-15 23:41 GMT+01:00 Ken Whistler :

>
>
> On 2/15/2018 2:24 PM, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
>
>> And it's in the mission of Unicode, IMHO, to promote litteracy
>>
>
> Um, no. And not even literacy, either. ;-)
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organizations_promoting_literacy
>
> --Ken
>
>
>

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription

[James Kass via Unicode]

I'd not've thought "I'd've" was proscribed.  Who woulda guessed?

On Thu, Feb 15, 2018 at 2:35 PM, Shawn Steele via Unicode
<unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
> Depends on your perspective I guess ;)
>
> -Original Message-
> From: Unicode <unicode-boun...@unicode.org> On Behalf Of Richard Wordingham 
> via Unicode
> Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2018 2:31 PM
> To: unicode@unicode.org
> Subject: Re: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription
>
> On Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:38:19 +
> Shawn Steele via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
>
>> I realize "I'd've" isn't
>> "right",
>
> Where did that proscription come from?  Is it perhaps a perversion of the 
> proscription of "I'd of"?
>
> Richard.
>

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Richard Wordingham wrote,

>> Klingon and Ewellic.  [winks]
>
> But wasn't that using a supplementary standard, the ConScript Unicode
> Registry?

The code points registered with CSUR were used for the interchange.
But, to clarify, CSUR is not an official supplement to The Unicode
Standard.  Of course, any exchange of PUA data requires an agreement
between senders and recipients.  CSUR offers character mappings which
private individuals may agree to use for data exchange.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Ken Whistler via Unicode]

On 2/15/2018 2:24 PM, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:
And it's in the mission of Unicode, IMHO, to promote litteracy 


Um, no. And not even literacy, either. ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Organizations_promoting_literacy

--Ken

RE: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription

[Shawn Steele via Unicode]

Depends on your perspective I guess ;)

-Original Message-
From: Unicode <unicode-boun...@unicode.org> On Behalf Of Richard Wordingham via 
Unicode
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2018 2:31 PM
To: unicode@unicode.org
Subject: Re: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription

On Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:38:19 +
Shawn Steele via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:

> I realize "I'd've" isn't
> "right",

Where did that proscription come from?  Is it perhaps a perversion of the 
proscription of "I'd of"?

Richard.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 17:49:05 -0800
James Kass via Unicode  wrote:

> I've personally exchanged text data with others using the PUA for both
> Klingon and Ewellic.  [winks]

But wasn't that using a supplementary standard, the ConScript Unicode
Registry? 

Richard.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense? - Proscription

[Richard Wordingham via Unicode]

On Thu, 15 Feb 2018 21:38:19 +
Shawn Steele via Unicode  wrote:

> I realize "I'd've" isn't
> "right",

Where did that proscription come from?  Is it perhaps a perversion of
the proscription of "I'd of"?

Richard.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

2018-02-15 22:38 GMT+01:00 Shawn Steele via Unicode :

>
> I don't find emoji to necessarily be a "post-literate" thing.  Just a
> different way of communicating.  I have also seen them used in a
> "pre-literate" fashion.  Helping people that were struggling to learn to
> read get past the initial difficulties they were having on their way to
> becoming more literate.
>

If you just look at how more and more people "communicate" today on the
Internet, it's only by video, most of them of poor quality and actually no
graphic value at all where a single photo of the speaker on his profile
would be enough. So the web is overwhelmed now by poor videos just
containing speech, with very low value.

But the worse is that this fabulous collection is almost impossible to
qualify, sort, organize, it is not reusable, almost not transmissible
(except on the social network where they are posted and where they'll soon
disappear because there's simply no way to build efficient archives that
would be usable in some near future: just a haystack where even the
precious gold needles are extremely difficult to find.

If people don't know how to read and cannot reuse the content and transmit
it, they become just consumers and in fact less and less productors or
creators of contents. Just look at opinions under videos, most of them are
just "thumbs up", "like", "+1", barely counted only, unqualifiable (there's
not even a thumb down). Even these terms are avoided on the interface and
you just see an icon for the counter: do you have something to learn when
seeing these icons?

I fear that those in the near futuyre that won't be able to read and will
only be able to listen the medias produced by others, will not even be able
to make any judgement, and then will be easily manipulated.

And it's in the mission of Unicode, IMHO, to promote litteracy because it
is necessary for preserving, transmitting, and expanding the cultures, as
well as reconciliate peopel with sciences instead of just following the
voice of new gurus only because they look "fun".

RE: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Shawn Steele via Unicode]

For voice we certainly get clues about the speaker's intent from their tone.  
That tone can change the meaning of the same written word quite a bit.  There 
is no need for video to wildly change the meaning of two different readings of 
the exact same words.

Writers have always taken liberties with the written word to convey ideas that 
aren't purely grammatically correct.  This may be most obvious in poetry, but 
it happens even in other writings.  Maybe their entire reason was so that 
future English teachers would ask us why some author chose some peculiar 
structure or whatever.

I find it odd that I write things like "I'd've thought" (AFAIK I hadn't been 
exposed to I'd've and it just spontaneously occurred, but apparently others 
(mis)use it as well).  I realize "I'd've" isn't "right", but it better conveys 
my current state of mind than spelling it out would've.  Similarly, if I find 
myself smiling internally while I'm writing, it's going to get a :)

Though I may use :), I agree that most of my use of emoji is more decorative, 
however including other emoji can also make the sentence feel more "fun".  

If I receive a  as the only response to a comment I made, that conveys 
information that I would have a difficult time putting into words.

I don't find emoji to necessarily be a "post-literate" thing.  Just a different 
way of communicating.  I have also seen them used in a "pre-literate" fashion.  
Helping people that were struggling to learn to read get past the initial 
difficulties they were having on their way to becoming more literate.

-Shawn

-Original Message-
From: Unicode <unicode-boun...@unicode.org> On Behalf Of James Kass via Unicode
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2018 12:53 PM
To: Ken Whistler <kenwhist...@att.net>
Cc: Erik Pedersen <erik.peder...@shaw.ca>; Unicode Public <unicode@unicode.org>
Subject: Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,

> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another major hole in 
> written communication -- the need to convey emotional state and 
> affective attitudes towards the text.

There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which 'speak for 
themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that emoticons were invented for 
much the same reason that "typewriter art"
was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's novel.

> This is the kind of information that face-to-face communication has a 
> huge and evolutionarily deep bandwidth for, but which written 
> communication typically fails miserably at.

Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for telephone 
or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics and hand 
gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
These are rhetorical questions.

For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate age.  We 
already have people in positions of power who pride themselves on their 
marginal literacy and boast about the fact that they don't read much.  Sad!

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Ken Whistler replied to Erik Pedersen,

> Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another
> major hole in written communication -- the need to convey
> emotional state and affective attitudes towards the text.

There is no such need.  If one can't string words together which
'speak for themselves', there are other media.  I suspect that
emoticons were invented for much the same reason that "typewriter art"
was invented:  because it's there, it's cute, it's clever, and it's
novel.

> This is the kind of information that face-to-face
> communication has a huge and evolutionarily deep
> bandwidth for, but which written communication
> typically fails miserably at.

Does Braille include emoji?  Are there tonal emoticons available for
telephone or voice transmission?  Does the telephone "fail miserably"
at oral communication because there's no video to transmit facial tics
and hand gestures?  Did Pontius Pilate have a cousin named Otto?
These are rhetorical questions.

For me, the emoji are a symptom of our moving into a post-literate
age.  We already have people in positions of power who pride
themselves on their marginal literacy and boast about the fact that
they don't read much.  Sad!

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Christoph Päper via Unicode]

James Kass via Unicode :
> Martin J. Dürst 
>
>> The original Japanese cell phone carrier emoji where defined in the
>> unassigned area of Shift_JIS, not Unicode.
> 
> Thank you (and another list member) for reminding that it was
> originally hacked SJIS rather than proper PUA Unicode.

Japanese telcos were also not the first to use this space for pictographs and 
ideographs. Look at Sharp electronic typewriters from the early 1990s for 
instance (which can also be considered laptop computers), e.g. WD-A521 or 
WD-A551 or WD-A750. They already included much of what later became J-Phone / 
Vodafone / Softbank emojis.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Martin J. Dürst wrote:

> The original Japanese cell phone carrier emoji where defined in the
> unassigned area of Shift_JIS, not Unicode.

Thank you (and another list member) for reminding that it was
originally hacked SJIS rather than proper PUA Unicode.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Martin J. Dürst via Unicode]

On 2018/02/15 10:49, James Kass via Unicode wrote:


Yes, except that Unicode "supported" all manner of things being
interchanged by setting aside a range of code points for private use.
Which enabled certain cell phone companies to save some bandwidth by
assigning various popular in-line graphics to PUA code points.


The original Japanese cell phone carrier emoji where defined in the 
unassigned area of Shift_JIS, not Unicode. Shift_JIS doesn't have an 
official private area, but using the empty area by companies had already 
happened for Kanji (by IBM, NEC, Microsoft). Also, there was some 
transcoding software initially that mapped some of the emoji to areas in 
Unicode besides the PUA, based on very simplistic conversion.



The
"problem" was that these phone companies failed to get together on
those PUA code point assignments, so they could not exchange their
icons in a standard fashion between competing phone systems.  [Image
of the world's smallest violin playing.]


Emoji were originally a competitive device. As an example, NTT Docomo 
allowed the ticket service PIA to have an emoji for their service, most 
probably in order to entice them to sign up to participate in the 
original I-mode (first case of Web on mobile phones) service. Of course, 
that specific emoji (or was it several) wasn't encoded in Unicode 
because of trademark issues.


Regards,Martin.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 5:14 PM, David Starner  wrote:

> They were units of things being interchanged in formats of MIME types
> starting with text/ . From the beginning, Unicode has supported all the
> cruft that's being interchanged in formats of MIME types starting with
> text/.

Yes, except that Unicode "supported" all manner of things being
interchanged by setting aside a range of code points for private use.
Which enabled certain cell phone companies to save some bandwidth by
assigning various popular in-line graphics to PUA code points.  The
"problem" was that these phone companies failed to get together on
those PUA code point assignments, so they could not exchange their
icons in a standard fashion between competing phone systems.  [Image
of the world's smallest violin playing.]

I've personally exchanged text data with others using the PUA for both
Klingon and Ewellic.  [winks]

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[David Starner via Unicode]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 2:35 PM James Kass via Unicode 
wrote:

> David Starner wrote,
>
> > They were characters being interchanged as text
> > in current use.
>
> They were in-line graphics being interchanged as though they were
> text.  And they still are.  And we still disagree.
>

They were units of things being interchanged in formats of MIME types
starting with text/ . From the beginning, Unicode has supported all the
cruft that's being interchanged in formats of MIME types starting with
text/.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Ken Whistler via Unicode]

On 2/14/2018 12:49 PM, Philippe Verdy via Unicode wrote:



RCLLTHTWHNLPHBTSWRFRSTNVNTDPPLWRTTXTLKTHS !




[ ... lots to say about the history of writing ... ]

And the use (or abuse) of emojis is returning us to the prehistory 
when people draw animals on walls of caverns: this was a very slow 
communication, not giving a rich semantic, full of ambiguities about 
what is really meant, and in fact a severe loss of knowledge where 
people will not communicate easily and rapidly.


=-O Perhaps Philippe was missing my point about how and why emoji are 
actually used.


--Ken

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

David Starner wrote,

> They were characters being interchanged as text
> in current use.

They were in-line graphics being interchanged as though they were
text.  And they still are.  And we still disagree.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[David Starner via Unicode]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 11:16 AM James Kass via Unicode 
wrote:

> That's one way of looking at it.  Another way would be that the emoji
> were definitely outside the scope of the Unicode project as encoding
> them violated Unicode's initial encoding principles.
>

They were characters being interchanged as text in current use. They are
more inside the scope than many of the line-drawing characters for 8-bit
computers that have been there since day one, and analogous to many of the
dingbats that have also been there since day one.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Philippe Verdy via Unicode]

2018-02-14 20:50 GMT+01:00 Ken Whistler via Unicode :

>
> On 2/14/2018 12:53 AM, Erik Pedersen via Unicode wrote:
>
>> Unlike text composed of the world’s traditional alphabetic, syllabic,
>> abugida or CJK characters, emoji convey no utilitarian and unambiguous
>> information content.
>>
>
> I think this represents a misunderstanding of the function of emoji in
> written communication, as well as a rather narrow concept of how writing
> systems work and why they have evolved.
>
> RECALLTHATWHENALPHABETSWEREFIRSTINVENTEDPEOPLEWROTETEXTLIKETHIS
>

RCLLTHTWHNLPHBTSWRFRSTNVNTDPPLWRTTXTLKTHS !

The concept of vowels as distinctive letters came later, even the letter A
was initially a representation of a glottal stop consonnant, sometimes
mute, only written to indicate a word that did not start by a consonnant in
their first syllable, letter. This has survived today in abjads and
abugidas where vowels became optional diacritics, but that evolved as plain
diacritics in Indic abugidas.

The situation is even more complex because clusters of consonnants were
also represented in early vowel-less alphabets to represent full syllables
(this has formed the base of todays syllabaries when only some glyph
variants of the base consonnant was introduced to distinguish their
vocalization; Indic abugidas with their complex clusters where vowel
diacritic create contextual variant forms of the base consonnant is also a
remnant of this old age): the separation of phonetic consonnants came only
later. Today's alphabets have a long history of evolution and adaptation to
new needs for more precise communication and easier distinctions in
languages that have also evolved; some new letters or diacritics were
progressively abandonned, and but as the historic alphabets have persisted,
then came the concept of digrams to represent a single sound by multiple
letters, instead of inventing a new letter or diacritic, because the
language in which these digrams were used almost never needed the
phonetic letter
pairs or their phonology (or such letter pair was too rarely needed that
such use of digrams did not make the text undecipherable given the context
of use). Over time the alphabets became less and less representative of the
phonology (which evolved more rapidly than orthographies for texts that
languages wanted to preserve, or because various local phonetic variants of
the languages could stil lremain unified by keeping mute letters or letters
representing sounds realized differently across regions).

The invention of bicameral scripts later allowed easier distinction or
reading when contextual forms could be used to emphasize the structure
without necessarily using punctuation signs (the lowercase letters came
from handwriting, because the initial engraved letters were to difficult to
trace with a plum or pencil: letters were joined). Punctuation signs came
later which could have deprecated the use of bicameral orthography, but
languages have constinued to borrow terms from other languages, and the
bicameral distinction became important to preserve. The invention of
printing also produced artefacts in the orthography by the adoption of many
abbreviation signs (because the paper or parchemins were expensive), and
forced some simplifications of the handwritten style with a plum or pencil.

Our recent age of computers (or even before the mechanical typewritters)
have also dramatically simplified the alphabets because the character set
was severely reduced by limitations of the initial technologies (this could
have potentially killed all the abjads, abugidas, syllabaries or
ideo-phonographic scripts during the 20th century, if there was not a
popular resistance to preserve the culture of the initial texts written by
humans, and notably the precious religious books): it is still difficult
today to preserve many of the non-alphabetic scripts, and there's also
difficulties to preserve the meaning diacritics in abjads and abugidas and
even in alphabets, as well as bicameral distinctions. Finally the
preservation of letters inherited from etymology to allow readers to infer
semantics from words is difficult: this is the wellknown problem of
orthographic reforms that tend to remove mute letters, remove some phonetic
distinctions in letters and infer more and more the semantic from the
context: we are in fact slowly returning to the old age of:

RCLLTHTWHNLPHBTSWRFRSTNVNTDPPLWRTTXTLKTHS !

And the use (or abuse) of emojis is returning us to the prehistory when
people draw animals on walls of caverns: this was a very slow
communication, not giving a rich semantic, full of ambiguities about what
is really meant, and in fact a severe loss of knowledge where people will
not communicate easily and rapidly. The Emojis are a threat to the
inherited culture, knowledge and science in general: we won't understand
what was meant, and will loose our language to a point where it will be
very unproductive and will generate more 

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Ken Whistler via Unicode]

On 2/14/2018 12:53 AM, Erik Pedersen via Unicode wrote:

Unlike text composed of the world’s traditional alphabetic, syllabic, abugida 
or CJK characters, emoji convey no utilitarian and unambiguous information 
content.


I think this represents a misunderstanding of the function of emoji in 
written communication, as well as a rather narrow concept of how writing 
systems work and why they have evolved.


RECALLTHATWHENALPHABETSWEREFIRSTINVENTEDPEOPLEWROTETEXTLIKETHIS

The invention and development of word spacing, punctuation, and casing, 
among other elements of typography, represent the addition of meta-level 
information to written communication that assists in legibility, helps 
identify lexical and syntactic units, conveys prosody, and other 
information that is not well conveyed by simply setting down letters of 
an alphabet one right after the other.


Emoticons were invented, in large part, to fill another major hole in 
written communication -- the need to convey emotional state and 
affective attitudes towards the text. This is the kind of information 
that face-to-face communication has a huge and evolutionarily deep 
bandwidth for, but which written communication typically fails miserably 
at. Just adding a little happy face :-) or sad face :-( to a short email 
manages to convey some affect much more easily and effectively than 
adding on entire paragraphs trying to explain how one feels about what 
was just said. Novelists have the skill to do that in text without using 
little pictographic icons, but most of us are not professional writers! 
Note that emoticons were invented almost as soon as people started 
communicating in digital mediums like email -- so long predate anything 
Unicode came up with.


Other kinds of emoji that we've been adding recently may have a somewhat 
more uncertain trajectory, but the ones that seem to be most successful 
are precisely those which manage to connect emotionally with people, and 
which assist them in conveying how they *feel* about what they are writing.


So I would suggest that people not just dismiss (or diss) this ongoing 
phenomenon. Emoji are widely used for many good reasons. And of course, 
like any other aspect of writing, get mis-used in various ways, as well. 
But you can be sure that their impact on the evolution of world writing 
is here to stay and will be the topic of serious scholastic papers by 
scholars of writing for decades to come. ;-)


--Ken

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[James Kass via Unicode]

Alastair Houghton wrote,

> ...but they were definitely within the scope of the
> Unicode project as encoding them provides interoperability.

That's one way of looking at it.  Another way would be that the emoji
were definitely outside the scope of the Unicode project as encoding
them violated Unicode's initial encoding principles.

The opposition was strong, but resistance was futile.  Anyone
interested in the arguments made at the time should check the Unicode
public list archives in late 2008 and early 2009.  Here's the link for
January 2009:
http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2009-m01/index.html

Surprisingly, though, I have found at least one roundabout use for the
emoji.  When reading message boards and comment pages I've found that
it's quite simple to skip any messages which are peppered with emoji
without missing anything of substance.

As far as interoperability goes, there's scads of emoji in the wild
which aren't currently in Unicode.  Every kind of hobby or interest
seems to generate emoji specific to that area of interest.

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Alastair Houghton via Unicode]

On 14 Feb 2018, at 13:25, Shriramana Sharma via Unicode  
wrote:
> 
> From a mail which I had sent to two other Unicode contributors just a
> few days ago:
> 
> Frankly I agree that this whole emoji thing is a Pandora box. It
> should have been restricted to emoticons to express facial or physical
> gestures which are insufficiently representable by words. When it
> starts representing objects like  then it becomes a problem as to
> where to draw the line.

A lot of the emoji were encoded because they were in use on Japanese mobile 
phones.  A fair proportion of those may very well not meet the selection 
factors (see ) required for new 
emoji, but they were definitely within the scope of the Unicode project as 
encoding them provides interoperability.

As for newer emoji, whether they are encoded or not is up to the UTC, and as I 
say, they apply (or are supposed to apply) the criteria on the “Submitting 
Emoji Proposals” page.  There is certainly an argument that the encoding of new 
emoji should be discouraged in favour of functionality at higher layers (e.g. 
 tags in HTML), but, honestly, I think that ship has probably sailed.  
Similarly there are, I think, good reasons to object to the skin tone and 
gender modifiers, but we’ve already opened that can of worms and so will now 
have to put up with demands for red hair (or quite probably, freckles, 
monobrows, different hats, hair, beard and moustache styles and so on).

Kind regards,

Alastair.

--
http://alastairs-place.net

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Shriramana Sharma via Unicode]

>From a mail which I had sent to two other Unicode contributors just a
few days ago:

Frankly I agree that this whole emoji thing is a Pandora box. It
should have been restricted to emoticons to express facial or physical
gestures which are insufficiently representable by words. When it
starts representing objects like  then it becomes a problem as to
where to draw the line.

I mean I can see the argument for  representing gratitude, but which
fruits are valid and which not... And which food items are valid and
which not, else you would get proposals for idli and dosa emojis as
well! (Those who don't know what those are see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idli and
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dosa)

It seems to me that graphical items previously rejected as such are
now being encoded. I mean, if other things like bat ball etc then "why
not this one" cannot be refused, but the question is whether encoding
bat ball in the first place was keeping with the original intention or
spirit of Unicode.

Anyhow, what is done is done and the Pandora's box is now open and I
don't envy the ESC their job. I don't know, maybe sometimes they may
just feel like hitting "ESC" too!

--
Shriramana Sharma ஶ்ரீரமணஶர்மா श्रीरमणशर्मा ူ၆ိျိါအူိ၆ါး

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[Konstantin Ritt via Unicode]

2018-02-14 12:18 GMT+03:00 David Starner via Unicode :

> Even if mistakes were made, they were carved into stone, and going back is
> not an option.
>

Sure. However that doesn't mean Unicode should keep adding more and more
emoji nonsense.

A billion of cat faces, pile of poo, * skin tone
Santa/vampire/superwoman/levitating man, keycaps and clocks - are they
really that important for the Standard to be encoded separately?! Well,
that was a rhetorical question...


Regards,
Konstantin

Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

[David Starner via Unicode]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 12:55 AM Erik Pedersen via Unicode <
unicode@unicode.org> wrote:

> Dear Unicode Digest list members,
>
> Emoji, in my opinion, are almost entirely outside the scope of the Unicode
> project. Unlike text composed of the world’s traditional alphabetic,
> syllabic, abugida or CJK characters, emoji convey no utilitarian and
> unambiguous information content. Let us, therefore, abandon Emoji support
> in Unicode as a project that failed. If corporations want to maintain
> support for Emoji, let’s require them to use only the Private Use Area and,
> henceforth, confine Unicode expansion to attested characters from so far
> unsupported scripts.
>

Because ' has so much unambiguous information content. Or even just c.
(What's the phonetic value of that letter? Okay, I'll be "easy" on you;
what's the phonetic value of that letter in English? What about e?)

Also, who are the full members of Unicode?
http://www.unicode.org/consortium/members.html says Google, Apple, Huawei,
Facebook, Microsoft, etc. By show of hands, who wants a substantial part of
the user's data to become incompatible? I think they just voted this down.

Even ignoring that, this road has been crossed. Unicode will not tear out
anything, but if they could, people could probably survive Cuneiform or
Linear A going by the wayside. A not insubstantial part of the Unicode data
in the world includes emoji, and removing it would break everything. Like
many standards before that were radical changes, a new Unicode standard
without emoji would be dead in the water, and someone else would create a
competing back-compatible character standard and everyone would forget
about Unicode® and start using The One CCS®. It's like demanding that C use
bounds checking on its arrays, or that "island" go back to being spelled
"iland" now that we recognize it's not related to "isle". Even if mistakes
were made, they were carved into stone, and going back is not an option.