Re: Major vendors changing U+1F52B PISTOL 🔫 depiction from firearm to squirt gun

On 5/23/2018 8:53 AM, Abe Voelker via Unicode wrote:
> As a user I find it troublesome because previous messages I've sent
> using this character on these platforms may now be interpreted
> differently due to the changed representation. That aspect has me
> wondering if this change is in line with Unicode standard conformance
> requirements.
>

The Unicode Standard publishes only *text presentation* (black and
white) representative glyphs for emoji characters. And those text
presentation glyphs have been quite stable in the standard. For U+1F52B
PISTOL, the glyph currently published in Unicode 10.0 (and the one which
will be published imminently in Unicode 11.0) is precisely the same as
the glyph that was initially published nearly 8 years ago in Unicode
6.0. Care to check up on that?

Unicode 6.0: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-6.0/U60-1F300.pdf

Unicode 11.0: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-11.0/U110-1F300.pdf

What vendors do for their colorful *emoji presentation* glyphs is
basically outside the scope of the Unicode Standard. Technically, it is
outside the scope even of the separate Unicode Technical Standard #51,
Unicode Emoji, which specifies data, behavior, and other mechanisms for
promoting interoperability and valid interchange of emoji characters and
emoji sequences, but which does *not* try to constrain vendors in their
emoji glyph designs.

Now, sure, nobody wants their emoji for an avocado, to willy-nilly turn
into a completely unrelated emoji for a crying face. But many emoji are
deliberately vague in their scope of denotation and connotation, and the
vendors have a lot a leeway to design little images that they like and
their customers like. And the Unicode Standard does not now and probably
never will try to define and enforce precise semantics and usage rules
for every single emoji character.

Basically, it is a fool's game to be using emoji as if they were a
well-defined and standardized pictographic orthography with unchanging
semantics. If you want stable presentation of content, use a pdf
document or an image. If you want stable and accurate conveyance of
particular meaning -- well, write it out in the standard orthography of
a particular language. If you want playful and emotional little
pictographs accompanying text, well, then don't expect either stability
of the images or the meaning, because that isn't how emoji work. Case in
point: if you are using U+1F351 PEACH for its well-known resemblance to
a bum, well, don't complain to the Unicode Consortium if a phone vendor
changes the meaning of your message by redesigning its emoji glyph for
U+1F351 to a cut peach slice that more resembles a smile.

--Ken
Received on Wed May 23 2018 - 12:59:23 CDT