From: Christopher Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Sat Jan 03 2009 - 23:12:58 CST
Asmus Freytag wrote
> In that context, it's worth remembering that the two emoticons (sic)
> that have been encoded in Unicode forever at WHITE/BLACK SMILING FACE
> exist because of a single vendor's character set: IBM's code page 437
> (and its descendants).
CP 437 was a *pre-existing* standard - these emoji sets are a recent
dodgy use of empty slots in Shift-JIS. Funny thing is the phone carriers
are not even using UCS on their phones. However it seems Unicode is now
being called on to solve their interoperability problems because they
were stupid enough not to first agree amongst themselves on a common use
of unencoded Shift-JIS characters. If the emoji are encoded, are these
carriers going to start using the UCS on their phones?
Why not simply map the otherwise unused Shift-JIS characters these
cell-phone carriers are (ab)using to a set of UCS characters reserved
for the purpose - without saying anything about the characters other
than that they correspond to these Shift-JIS characters being used for
emoji?
- C
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