Re: Emoji and Search Engines

From: Christopher Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Tue Jan 06 2009 - 11:23:28 CST

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    Kenneth Whistler wrote:

    > The UTC has heard quite clearly from the search engine companies
    > (and others) that having a standard character encoding for dealing
    > with these existing characters in data is better than a PUA-based
    > encoding -- and that that clearly *is* in their interests. Any
    > such contention is quite different from the assessment as to
    > whether the Japanese wireless carriers should have treated any
    > of this stuff as SJIS extension gaiji characters in the first
    > place.

    "better than a PUA encoding" does not mean encoding these characters in
    the UCS is essential or even the best solution. I'm sure the likes of
    Google, MSN, Yahoo etc employ people clever enough to come up with an
    even better solution..

    ...

    > "These" companies? The lazy, stop-gap measure, if such it was,
    > was perpetrated by the Japanese wireless companies, which sought
    > an easy way to extend their character sets to make
    > various culturally appropriate symbols, pictographs, and emoticons
    > available quickly on phones. And they did it by a methodology
    > that has a long history in Japan: gaiji. As I've pointed out
    > before, this is just the latest example of this process in
    > Japan, cycling around from when the Japanese OS companies did
    > this kind of thing in extending JIS for Japanese computers back
    > in the 80's.

    If this is just the "latest example", when will the next example cycle
    around? ~ Will the UTC want to encode that too?

    - C



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