From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Tue Jan 06 2009 - 00:45:57 CST
Peter Constable wrote:
>> By the way, one of the reasons I have spoken out strongly against
>> having the 10 flag-icon-based-locale-symbols in the emoji sets
>> being turned into an excuse for an open-ended scheme for encoding
>> flags as characters is because I *agree* with John's general
>> contention about the inappropriateness of using characters to
>> represent entities that are essentially images, rather than
>> text symbols.
> I've the same inclination as Ken here. And this is a clear indicator of the contention I made the other day that it's premature to suggest that UTC is heading off the deep end of encoding arbitrary graphic entities as characters.
This seems to me merely inconsistent. There is a set of images that are
being treated as if they were text using a non-standard encoding. Now
there is a proposal to standardise that encoding so that search engines
can perpetuate the treatment of these images as text. But members of the
standards body are objecting that some of the images are more
'essentially' images than other images? An animated image of steaming
turd is less essentially an image than a flag, fluttering or otherwise?
It is more of a 'text symbol'?
This makes no sense to me. Although I disagree with Mark Crispin about
whether the emoji should be encoded, I agree with him that the encoding
of the proposed emoji set should be all or nothing. I don't see any
basis for picking and choosing that isn't arbitrary and counter to the
rationale for encoding emoji at all.
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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