Shlomi Tal <shlompi at hotmail dot com> wrote: > And since emoticons are very useful, and are not compatibility > hacks, then why not add a few more to the Misc Symbols set? White > winking face, for example? I already use the white smiling face on > discussion boards, as an HTML NCR, and it's smashing. Wouldn't a > few more be useful?
Codifying emoticons is a problem for the same reason (notionally) as spelling "banana" -- getting started is easy; the tricky part is knowing when to stop. The smiling face and frowning face have fairly obvious value as emoticons. I use U+263A (in its UCN form, "\u263a) sometimes when posting to this list. A winking face and a "surprised" or "shocked" face could arguably be useful as well. But once you get past those four, there's not much left except glyph variants ( :-) with nose and :) without nose are equivalent) and idiotic things invented by kids with way too much time on their hands. The example I gave on 2002-02-15 (http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2002-m02/0302.html) was "man with glasses and a mohawk sticking his tongue out and drooling," but I'm sure you can think of many others. Some people believe that encoding certain entities (Klingon comes to mind) would bring great embarrassment to Unicode and cause people not to respect it or take it seriously. That's how I feel about encoding additional smileys. -Doug Ewell Fullerton, California
