Re:Emojis paved the way for UTF-8 everywhere
by Freak_NL on Wednesday November 18, 2020 @03:25AM
(#25134361)
CJK Unified Ideograph Extension B/C/D are all pretty exotic though. In normal daily use you won't encounter them, because input methods rarely offer them and people simply don't need them. These are important characters, but only a handful of them will ever be used by the average writer of Chinese or Japanese.
I was using some of these (from B and probably C) for very specific purposes at that time, and general support was a long way off in 2009 (although already good on GNU/Linux distributions).
Unfortunately, this has been false for a long time. BMP turned out to be not even barely enough even by Unicode 3.0 [1] where the initial set of Unicode emoji (722 characters) would barely fit in the undesignated area of BMP. Many important characters, starting from a larger set like CJKV and eventually to almost everything by Unicode 6.0 [2], got allocated in SMP and SIP instead as a result. HKSCS additions in the CJK Unified Ideograph Extension B block (U+20000..2A6FF) are notable examples.
[1] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/bmp/bmp-3-0.html
[2] https://www.unicode.org/roadmaps/bmp/bmp-6-0-0.html