Re:2015: The Year of Emoji Diversity
by krick on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @07:41PM
(#8559935)
I'm not against people doing weird stuff, so all these smileys and putting them in every new mobile app and all that stuff is fine. I don't like it, but it's just my opinion, so that's fine.
But what I'm really against is spoiling one of the most important of all standards we have now with that. I consider a bit questionable the fact that emoji (and other inconsistent symbol sets) are built into unicode already, but considering the time it was done and the origin of those symbols that's somewhat OK. But, srsly, guys, racial diversity for some smileys in the unicode? Really? Why not racial diversity for Pacman? It's crazy, really. It's some symbols that even shouldn't actually be there (in the unicode, I mean).
I guess we really should see that as a problem. Unicode is a complicated standard. Actual encodings of unicode even more so. Imperfect programs working on imperfect systems, trying to support that stuff, rendering engines rendering that stuff, countless font formats and protocols having to deal with that stuff and et cetera, et cetera — even more so. And unless we are forking unicode itself with purpose to make "coding standard for sane people" (and if we are sane, we are NOT doing it for obvious reasons) we must to be thinking about supporting all insane stuff introduced into unicode itself, because it is the reason for standards to exist in the first place — to be covered by implementations. So introducing all that complicated stuff without any real reason is a big problem, and we should be worried, because it's us who will suffer from awful standards later, and not some guys with fancy hairstyles doing business with mtv and stuff.
So you want colorful smileys? Use imaging file formats, goddammit. PNG, SVG. Invent your own markup standard (like {smiley12:asian}) to be used with all sorts of tweeting apps. Don't mess with encoding standards.
But what I'm really against is spoiling one of the most important of all standards we have now with that. I consider a bit questionable the fact that emoji (and other inconsistent symbol sets) are built into unicode already, but considering the time it was done and the origin of those symbols that's somewhat OK. But, srsly, guys, racial diversity for some smileys in the unicode? Really? Why not racial diversity for Pacman? It's crazy, really. It's some symbols that even shouldn't actually be there (in the unicode, I mean).
I guess we really should see that as a problem. Unicode is a complicated standard. Actual encodings of unicode even more so. Imperfect programs working on imperfect systems, trying to support that stuff, rendering engines rendering that stuff, countless font formats and protocols having to deal with that stuff and et cetera, et cetera — even more so. And unless we are forking unicode itself with purpose to make "coding standard for sane people" (and if we are sane, we are NOT doing it for obvious reasons) we must to be thinking about supporting all insane stuff introduced into unicode itself, because it is the reason for standards to exist in the first place — to be covered by implementations. So introducing all that complicated stuff without any real reason is a big problem, and we should be worried, because it's us who will suffer from awful standards later, and not some guys with fancy hairstyles doing business with mtv and stuff.
So you want colorful smileys? Use imaging file formats, goddammit. PNG, SVG. Invent your own markup standard (like {smiley12:asian}) to be used with all sorts of tweeting apps. Don't mess with encoding standards.
Cannot something be done about that?