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.
