Re: Emoji: emoticons vs. literacy

From: Doug Ewell (doug@ewellic.org)
Date: Wed Jan 07 2009 - 08:09:45 CST

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    Andrew West <andrewcwest at gmail dot com> wrote:

    > That's room for exactly 500 characters, and the emoji proposal is for
    > 618 new characters. So clearly there is no room for emoji in the BMP;
    > and even if we could squeeze them into the little remaining space, it
    > would be much better to have them in one chunk outside the BMP

    I would just about always agree with the "contiguous chunk" goal. There
    doesn't seem much point in taking a new block of 618 characters and
    putting some here, some there.

    > (Plane 14 seems a good place for characters that are being encoded for
    > interoperability reasons)

    Plane 14 is where formatting characters go to die. There are the tag
    characters, and we know what the attitude toward those is. Then there
    are the supplemental variation selectors, numbered 17 through 256, which
    may only be used as defined by Unicode, which so far has not defined any
    sequences using a variation selector beyond "1". The chances of more
    than 16 variations being formally defined for a single character seem
    about as remote as the chances of the tag characters falling into favor
    again. But of course, you never know.

    No, I can easily imagine the emoji being encoded somewhere in the
    U+1Exxx range. Which at least would seal the deal for mainstream
    support of the Astral Planes, once and for all, since we know how
    important the emoji are to the industry leaders who are the backbone of
    Unicode.

    --
    Doug Ewell  *  Thornton, Colorado, USA  *  RFC 4645  *  UTN #14
    http://www.ewellic.org
    http://www1.ietf.org/html.charters/ltru-charter.html
    http://www.alvestrand.no/mailman/listinfo/ietf-languages  ˆ
    


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