From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Sun Jan 04 2009 - 22:56:37 CST
Asmus Freytag wrote:
> The fact that the request to provide a solution using non-PUA
> character codes is so strongly supported by leading search engine
> manufacturer(s) should give you pause here.
It did give me pause, and that was the point that I realised that it is
not in the interests of those companies to use any character codes for
emoji, PUA or otherwise. Quite simply, Unicode character codes do not
appear to be up to the task of encoding an open ended set of images that
users might want to transmit to and from mobile devices, which is the
problem that those companies should be trying to solve, rather than
hijacking a plain text encoding standard with an insufficient subset of
such images. I understand that it was easy and convenient to use text
character codes for this limited set of images to date, but it was not a
good idea: I'm tempted to say it was a lazy, stop-gap measure, lacking
in any sort of vision about the social use of technology that these
companies are supposed to understand. It is not simply that I think
these images do not belong in Unicode, but that adding them to Unicode
does not solve the real problem. Since a proper solution, capable of
addressing the long future use of inline images in communications, would
by its nature also solve the present problem of non-standard handling of
current emoji sets, why spend so much time and energy forcing Unicode to
accept something that will be obsolete almost as soon as it completes
the ballot process?
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Gulf Islands, BC tiro@tiro.com The Lord entered her to become a servant. The Word entered her to keep silence in her womb. The thunder entered her to be quiet. -- St Ephrem the Syrian
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