forced rendering of smileys and other emoticons

Hi all,

While superficially following some of the recent debate about flags, I
was reminded of the bothersome forced rendering of short ASCII sequences
as smiley faces by some software. I'm of course thinking about email
programs and chat clients.

I was wondering whether there are any opinions and recommendations in
the Unicode community on how software should best deal with this issue.
It seems like "always use Unicode characters" works only to the extent
that a vendor is willing to restrict itself to Unicode characters, but
it is one approach. "use markup" looks like another (and individual
vendors can easily extend their symbol inventory that way - which may or
may not desirable in any given situation). Being able to undo forced
emoticons and faithful transmission of the non-emoticon symbol sequence
must be possible.

I'm not familiar with the detailed history of Unicode emoji, but I'm
wondering whether there are any standards, proposals, or implementation
recommendations out there for vendors of chat clients and the like.
Since it seems like it is, for the software that I'm using, an as-of-yet
insufficiently addressed problem.

Stephan Stiller
Received on Sat Jun 02 2012 - 04:02:04 CDT