And to put Mark's comments in some statistical perspective, in the context
of all the media hype, the true "big bang" for emoji in Unicode was
Version 6.0,
released over 4-1/2 years ago now. *That* was the Unicode release that added
hundreds and hundreds of emoji for Japanese carrier interoperability, as
well
as the regional indicator mechanism for the representation of flag
pictographs.
But at the time, relatively few people noticed, because no Unicode emoji
were
on phones yet.
Unicode 7.0, which resulted in the huge media splash about emoji last
year, actually
only added 103 emoji, and the majority of those were very old news:
old-fashioned
pictographs for Webdings compatibility. There were only a few high
visibility,
emotionally catchy new additions among that set, such as the CHIPMUNK and
the you-know-what-I'm-talking-about hand gesture, that convinced people this
was a bigger deal new release than it was. But suddenly everything was
visible
on phones, and that made all the difference for the general public.
Unicode 8.0 is about to be released, and it will have just 41 emoji
additions --
among them the 5 emoji modifiers that are already available on phones
to address the emoji diversity issue.
And the UTC just approved 38 new emoji candidates that will be the likely
basis of the emoji additions for Unicode 9.0 next year.
Once we get through the Unicode 8.0 and Unicode 9.0 cycles, this process
will have settled into a kind of a routine -- and it will be apparent to all
what the likely scale and scope of future emoji additions *as Unicode
characters*
will be: a few dozen per year, carefully picked based on a set of
criteria now to be set
out in the new UTR #51 regarding emoji.
The sky isn't falling here. ;-) The Unicode Consortium has not suddenly
transmogrified into the Emoji Consortium. People will get used to the fact
that a few dozen new emoji characters get added to the standard every
year -- ho hum.
And for folks who can't wait through the
two-years-from-proposal-to-implementation
cycles of character encoding committees, well... those stickers are out
there
waiting for you.
--Ken
On 5/15/2015 5:18 PM, Mark Davis ☕️ wrote:
>
> However, we do have strong short-term pressure to show that we are
> responsive and responsible in adding emoji. And our adding a
> reasonable number of emoji per year is not going to stop Line or Skype
> from adding stickers!
>
Received on Fri May 15 2015 - 20:22:31 CDT
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