points by p-e-w 19 hours ago | 0 comments
> Okay but why should Unicode be a part of it, and a judge on what to include?
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.
[–] orbital-decay 19 hours ago
[–] thunderfork 6 hours ago
The original set of emoji were from JP mobile phones (pre-unicode-emoji) and should not be confused with kaomoji/emoticons
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.