Unicode started with the mission to encode all characters needed for written communication in the world.
This was already broad, but was not unusual for its time. Unlike Wikipedia, Unicode never went through a battle between inclusionists and deletionists. Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine).
Instead it ended up as a fancy clip art library that every software somehow has to support, but with no way to implement the standard in its entirety.
Unicode still does lots of work on language support. The notion that emoji support impedes that is simply not true.
And people were already doing emojis with phpBB, MSN Messenger, etc. The alternative to Unicode emojis would not be "no emojis", but "every platform with their own proprietary incompatible implementation".
Han Unification has been discussed a million times already. Originally Unicode only had 2 bytes and 65k characters. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not – I don't speak these languages and those who do often disagree on this as well. However, changing it now would probably introduce be more pain than it solves.
Humans have other purposes than satisfying stated goals.
That’s often described as a flaw, e.g. to err is human, but it’s what we do. Some degree of chaos can help for efficient problem-solving.
Based on past history, we may never get perfect encoding for historical Earthlings, e.g. what about the following list looks well-planned and coordinated for the future?: ASCII, ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), ISO 8859-3, ISO 8859-4, ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic), ISO 8859-6 (Arabic), ISO 8859-7 (Greek), ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew), ISO 8859-8-I, ISO 8859-10, ISO 8859-13, ISO 8859-14, ISO 8859-15, ISO 8859-16, Windows-1250, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, Windows-1253, Windows-1254, Windows-1255, Windows-1256, Windows-1257, Windows-1258, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, GB2312, GBK, Big5, HZ-GB-2312, TIS-620, MacRoman, MacCyrillic, UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE/LE), UTF-32 (BE/LE), CESU-8, UTF-7, IBM866, IBM437, IBM850, IBM852, IBM855, IBM857, IBM862, IBM864, IBM866, KZ1048, IBM874 (TIS-620), VNI, Windows-874, Mac Thai, Mac Central European.
Emoji can be seen as a bait for implementations to support under-represented or ancient scripts as a side effect. In fact, emoji worked so well that we now have a universal full non-BMP support everywhere. For example, MySQL used to have the cursed BMP-only utf8 charset aka utf8mb3! It lasted until everyone started to complain about emojis.
>Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine).
Why do you say that? Because Unicode now has become balkanised between various CJK regions?
The iconic decoration reflects light in all directions and transforms every room - no matter how big its size - into a glamorous space in which people can dance or dream.
I never thought about dreaming in a room with a disco ball in it. I think the informality of emoji proposals is really special!
It should reflect the colors of pixels on the screen in all different directions in real time, and also cast bright spots of colored light all over the screen, while spinning. The stress test would be to fill the entire screen with many disco balls, over live video. Also a set of colored spotlight and smoke machine emojis would go well with it nicely too.
Naturally, it should also make all full body emoji start dancing, but only when proximate and with a line of sight not obstructed by a U+99385 SOLID WALL. Specific dance moves are implementation dependent, but SHOULD adapt to the user’s locale.
Would be the most culturally neutral "party emoji". Party popper is not used that much outside of Anglosphere, confetti ball even less so and its emoji looks like medusa.
Why would you have such a thing? When you communicate, you know the receivers' culture, isn't it? Otherwise wouldn't it be a rather infrequent symbol with less practical use than e.g. "incomplete infinity"?
For a glorious few hours after one of the last emoji updates hacker news did support it because they didn’t filter those ones out yet. They do not filter out some of the quasi emojis like the hieroglyphs.
It's not a matter of not supporting it; if you can store UTF-8 (as HN does) then you can store emojis. It's that HN actively strips emojis. One of the more childish and petty aspects of the site IMO.
weinzierl|6 months ago
Unicode started with the mission to encode all characters needed for written communication in the world. This was already broad, but was not unusual for its time. Unlike Wikipedia, Unicode never went through a battle between inclusionists and deletionists. Moreover, with Han Unification it strayed from its core mission to "encode all characters needed for written communication in the world" (emphasis mine).
Instead it ended up as a fancy clip art library that every software somehow has to support, but with no way to implement the standard in its entirety.
arp242|6 months ago
And people were already doing emojis with phpBB, MSN Messenger, etc. The alternative to Unicode emojis would not be "no emojis", but "every platform with their own proprietary incompatible implementation".
Han Unification has been discussed a million times already. Originally Unicode only had 2 bytes and 65k characters. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe not – I don't speak these languages and those who do often disagree on this as well. However, changing it now would probably introduce be more pain than it solves.
uratbastrd|6 months ago
That’s often described as a flaw, e.g. to err is human, but it’s what we do. Some degree of chaos can help for efficient problem-solving.
Based on past history, we may never get perfect encoding for historical Earthlings, e.g. what about the following list looks well-planned and coordinated for the future?: ASCII, ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1), ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), ISO 8859-3, ISO 8859-4, ISO 8859-5 (Cyrillic), ISO 8859-6 (Arabic), ISO 8859-7 (Greek), ISO 8859-8 (Hebrew), ISO 8859-8-I, ISO 8859-10, ISO 8859-13, ISO 8859-14, ISO 8859-15, ISO 8859-16, Windows-1250, Windows-1251, Windows-1252, Windows-1253, Windows-1254, Windows-1255, Windows-1256, Windows-1257, Windows-1258, KOI8-R, KOI8-U, KOI8-RU, Shift_JIS, EUC-JP, EUC-KR, GB2312, GBK, Big5, HZ-GB-2312, TIS-620, MacRoman, MacCyrillic, UTF-8, UTF-16 (BE/LE), UTF-32 (BE/LE), CESU-8, UTF-7, IBM866, IBM437, IBM850, IBM852, IBM855, IBM857, IBM862, IBM864, IBM866, KZ1048, IBM874 (TIS-620), VNI, Windows-874, Mac Thai, Mac Central European.
lifthrasiir|6 months ago
jan_Inkepa|6 months ago
Why do you say that? Because Unicode now has become balkanised between various CJK regions?
thomascountz|6 months ago
DonHopkins|6 months ago
kungp|6 months ago
handsclean|6 months ago
lifestyleguru|6 months ago
charcircuit|6 months ago
Because it's a Japan only thing.
gpt5|6 months ago
tgv|6 months ago
donatj|6 months ago
I'd be curious to know how the actual usage stats aligned with their expectations.
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
cubefox|6 months ago
bombcar|6 months ago
𓂸 Out for harambe.
weinzierl|6 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23659248
It's just that most people can't deal with them responsibly, so it has not been made easy.
arp242|6 months ago
kingstnap|6 months ago
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
michaelt|6 months ago
ygritte|6 months ago
heinrich5991|6 months ago
deathanatos|6 months ago
I also appreciate melting face, dotted outline face, and face with salute. Low battery & ID card.
kookamamie|6 months ago
saw-lau|6 months ago
portaouflop|6 months ago
Name 1 bad thing that came from the invention of emojis that is comparable to the others
tyleo|6 months ago
paglaghoda|6 months ago
[deleted]