[centimeter]

Is your life really improved by having access to <tilted heart face>?

Unicode is a massive clusterfuck. We’ve completely eliminated most of the advantages it might have held in the first place, like unambiguous character seeking from an arbitrary offset into the encoded byte stream. Now you have characters composed of multiple codepoints, for a few legitimate use cases like diacritics (which should actually not be handled this way) but mostly for dumb hybrid emoji shit. “Zero width joiners” should not exist. Even the diacritic stuff is total nonsense, and unsurprisingly has resulted in multiple serious vulnerabilities on various platform (iOS has had like 5 diacritic-induced crashes).

It’s fine to have a panlingual character standard, but it should be implemented as a minimal set of complete characters (no multi-codepoint bullshit) without pictorial nonsense like <various stupid multi-codepoint emoji> which should obviously be handled by a generalized vector graphics format.

Edit: in a hilarious demonstration of my point, HN strips emoji from the post text!