Is a combination of characters solely for the combined glyphic appearance, which is frequently used over a long time, commonly considered a proof of demand for encoding additional symbols or emojis?
Most Western emoticons have one or more conventional ASCII-only strings representing a sideways face, e.g. “;-)” and “;)” for 😉 U+1F609 or the infamous heart “<3” ❤️ U+2764 etc. Many also (or only) have an upright Eastern emote form which often uses characters way beyond U+007F or U+00FF, e.g. “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” who brought us 🤷 U+1F937 and “^_^” or “^^” for 😊 U+1F60A or the IPA-Cyrillic butterfly “ƸӁƷ”. In many a messaging software (mail, texting, chat, forum, board, blog …) a large (partially proprietary, partially conventionalized) set of those is supported to be converted to images or Unicode code-points. In fact, most original smiley repertoires were probably based upon prior art, i.e. already established character sequences. In the 200X years, there was quite a competition in supporting new codes and designing themes for them. Today the kids got stickers and GIF memes to supplement standard Unicode emojis. Is there any UTR or the like that tracks canonic non-emoji character sequences for emoji characters? On a related matter, is there any document issued by the Unicode Consortium which acknowledges a standard set of “short names” as used in :colon_codes:? There are several more or less diverging collections: - Emoji One’s EAC: https://github.com/Ranks/emojione/blob/master/emoji.json - Github’s Gemoji: https://github.com/github/gemoji/blob/master/db/emoji.json - Muan.co’s Emojilib: https://github.com/muan/emojilib/blob/master/emojis.json - Unicodey’s Emoji Data: https://github.com/iamcal/emoji-data/blob/master/emoji.json - …
