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.
