Re: Emoji: Public Review December 2008

From: Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven (asmodai@in-nomine.org)
Date: Sun Dec 21 2008 - 03:32:49 CST


-On [20081221 06:32], Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org) wrote:
>Japanese cell-phone vendors are using these symbols as plain text
>characters. About this fact, there can be no reasonable disagreement.
>As to whether a symbol like ROASTED SWEET POTATO carries any
>communicative value, beyond being a picture of a roasted sweet potato,
>there can be plenty of disagreement.

The problem with a lot of those symbols is that they assume a Japanese
cultural background. I have been to Japan, I dabble in the language, and I
recognise ideas in some of those emoji that are really, really cultural
specific and carry little to no weight/understanding outside of this
cultural reference.

>> What is needed most, at this juncture, is not further opinionizing
>> about the value of these proposed characters, but the detailed work of
>> sorting them into the standard. There are enough hard questions to be
>> answered:
>
>So, in other words, the decision to encode the entire set has been made,
>and resistance is futile.

Which I find a bad precedent. It effectively means Unicode has now moved to
more 'backroom decision making' policy instead of an open standard one.

I seriously wonder why this has to be encoded into Unicode and cannot be
done in a private use area.
I've seen better proposals/ideas get told to sod off and use a PUA, yet this
will be forced into the standard?

I am not seeing the wisdom in this one, sorry.

-- 
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai
イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン
http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B
No stars tonight, they have all ceased. No moon tonight will cast its
gleam... just a single flame lighting my journey...


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