I am going to ignore the religious propaganda and get straight to the point: I do not understand what you are proposing. What shortcomings do you see in the way Unicode currently handles emoji and how does your idea address those issues?
Because if you’re worried that the standard is at risk of eventually running out of space for new emoji, you’re tilting at windmills. That is literally never going to happen. At the current rate it’s going to take well over a century to fill up even just the tiny sliver of the code space set aside specifically for emoji at the bottom end of plane 1. Besides, most emoji are made up of multiple code points anyway and there’s no limit to how long these sequences can get. Am So., 22. März 2026 um 13:51 Uhr schrieb Lee Shallis via Unicode < [email protected]>: > Whoops, forgot I started this thread, another instance of my adhd's > effects :| > > The inappropriate religious material after the message should have been > removed by the moderators. > > That's in my message signature, I don't think said moderator can remove > that. Also Nothing inappropriate about trying to guide lost souls to > salvation, only the cruel and/or naive try to prevent the spread of God's > word. That said I agree it's irrelevant to the topic I started so let's > just agree to shelve the subject with my response (by that I mean don't > respond to this response). If people want to read my signature they're > welcome to, likewise they're welcome to ignore it. Not my problem if they > wanna risk internal suffering 🤷 > > As far as the shift-in/shift-out encoding thing goes, it should still be > implemented as a fallback pool. Sooner or later the current pool will run > out. Reserving a couple of codes for that eventuality is always a good > idea. Since it's something for the future current software can easily > implement a default handling of this: > > if ( code == start_emoji ) while ( getnxtc() != end_emoji ); > if ( code == end_emoji ) while ( getnxtc() != end_emoji ); > if ( code == start_emoji || code == end_emoji ) putnxtc('�'); > > That would allow them to put off supporting that large range for later > since it's expected to not be touched until the current pool runs out. > Remember the goal of unicode is to support all characters, even if it needs > another pool for that later. Whether text encoding implements a shortcut to > that pool at a later date and gets named something like UTE-8 (Universal > Text formatting with Emoji pool shortcut) or something is an entirely > unrelated matter, this is merely for within the unicode space. > > On Fri, 20 Mar 2026 at 19:47, Doug Ewell via Unicode < > [email protected]> wrote: > >> Lee Shallis wrote: >> >> > [Are there [start] emoji [end] style codes?] If not I suggest making >> > them so you're no longer constrained to the tiny range of potential >> > codes that unicode offers. >> >> Unicode has more than 800,000 unassigned code points, which I don’t >> consider “tiny.” Continuing to dip into this pool is considered preferable >> to introducing a new stateful “begin/end” mechanism, and all of the >> problems that those bring along. >> >> James Kass replied: >> >> > The inappropriate religious material after the message should have >> > been removed by the moderators. >> >> +1, emphatically. >> >> Phil Smith III replied (to Lee): >> >> > For starters, you’re confusing Unicode with encoding. >> >> This confused me greatly, until I realized Phil meant “... with ISO >> 2022-style shift-in/shift-out encoding.” >> >> Technically, you can in fact combine Unicode with ISO 2022 (for whatever >> reason), but adding a new mechanism, outside of Unicode, to encode emoji >> makes no sense at all. >> >> > Now, I can imagine modifier characters, like combining accents, that >> > would change skin tones etc.—but I’d rather not: combiners have caused >> > enough trouble, and I’d hate to see new ones added. >> >> Um, isn’t that how skin tones are specified already? >> >> -- >> Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org >> >> >> > > -- > Aethiests expect you to gamble your afterlife on nothingness, religions in > general expect you to follow 1001 (exaggeration for some, understatement > for others) rules and still gamble your afterlife on somehow not breaking > any of those rules (which is nigh on impossible). > > Christianity is the only one that doesn't expect you to gamble, it just > expects you to desire to follow God's ways and entrust your soul to his > son's, the lord Jesus Christ's, sacrifice on the cross. Just 2 simple and > priceless things to guarantee yourself a place in heaven, are you really > willing to gamble your afterlife on anything else when the cost of losing > that gamble is eternal suffering? > > For whether you believe in a God or not eternity is a fact and that same > fact guarantees life after the death of your flesh. Think carefully about > whether you would rather gamble for eternity in heaven with the only price > of being wrong being a little embarrassment or for reincarnation where the > price of being wrong is an eternity of being burned from flesh to bone and > soul over and over and over again. >
