From: Peter Constable (petercon@microsoft.com)
Date: Mon Jan 05 2009 - 10:33:38 CST
From: unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] On Behalf Of John Hudson
> Peter, much earlier in this discussion, you mentioned that the companies
> involved in proposing the emoji subset in some way understood that a
> different mechanism would be needed to extend the set for users
I should qualify my earlier statement: I got that impression from a comment I heard in a UTC discussion, but it was a while ago, and I may be remembering this incorrectly: the comment may have been more to the effect that the telcos do not plan to add any more emoji.
> So
> what prevents this other mechanism being used for the current subset
> also? Since it is going to be necessary
Well, necessary if they decide to add more emoji.
The answer to what prevents another mechanism being used -- for the current subset or even just for new emoji, assuming new emoji are ever used -- depends on what the requirements are and what communication protocols are in use. For instance, one possible scenario is that a vendor migrates all of their text messaging to being based on HTML rather than plain text, and the emoji get represented in messages as proprietary URL references. Another possible scenario is that the JPN telcos create a consortium for maintaining a registry of emoji IDs and then the emoji get represented in messages using those IDs (with some markup scheme). Those are very different scenarios, and the barriers to adoption are quite different. And for these or any other potential scenario, I have no idea whatsoever what level of interest any of the JPN telcos have in such investment -- though if I had to guess, my first guess would be that don't see adding new emoji as driving their business model and that they have no business case for
investing in new mechanisms when the existing text-based mechanism can do what they need.
Peter
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