Correction: Unicode emojis are, because they got added to Unicode.
>Language and writing have always been continuously evolving and that process didn’t magically stop when the Internet was invented.
Okay but why should Unicode be a part of it, and a judge on what to include? That sounds like linguistic prescriptivism, while the original role of Unicode was descriptive and the evolution was happening outside of it. Emojis before Unicode were perfectly fine as composites that weren't mandated by committee.
[–] p-e-w 19 hours ago
[–] orbital-decay 19 hours ago
Unicode emojis did not exist before Unicode, the existing composite emojis/kaomojis/etc were already perfectly expressible in existing symbols, and were nothing like Unicode emojis. This was a huge distraction from their mission, and definitely not inevitable.
Today's emotes became customized, and it's impossible to express them in any encoding. They diverged too much from writing to be called writing, it's a volatile signaling system at best. You can literally make an AI generation or upload your picture, how do you even encode or standardize that? But because of their blunder Unicode got stuck with its role of a judge and censor of a new entirely synthetic language it created, which wasn't the original purpose of the consortium.
How could it be otherwise? These debates have been a part of Unicode since the beginning, such as which Chinese characters to unify, which ancient scripts to include, which attested glyphs get their own code points etc.
That’s simply what it means to be a standard: Decisions need to be made, and not everyone will agree with all of them.