Re: Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 13:59, James Kass via Unicode
<unicode_at_unicode.org> wrote:
>
> FAICT, the emoji repertoire is vendor-driven, just as the pre-Unicode
> emoji sets were vendor driven. Pre-Unicode, if a vendor came up with
> cool ideas for new emoji they added new characters to the PUA. Now that
> emoji are standardized, when vendors come up with new ideas they put
> them in the emoji ranges in order to preserve the standardization factor
> and ensure interoperability. (That's probably over-simplified and there
> are bound to be other factors involved.)

I do not believe that recent (post-6.0) emoji additions are
vendor-driven. There is no formal vendor representation on the ESC,
and most ESC members do not work for vendors. Current emoji additions
are driven by ordinary users, who are actively encouraged by the UTC
to propose novel characters for encoding:

http://blog.unicode.org/2018/04/submissions-open-for-2020-emoji.html
http://blog.unicode.org/2016/09/emoji-deadline.html

The vendors happily lap up whatever emojis the UTC throws at them, but
they seem to have little interest in taking control of the emoji
process.

> We should no more expect the conventional Unicode character encoding
> model to apply to emoji than we should expect the old-fashioned text
> ranges to become vendor-driven.

Why should we not expect the conventional Unicode character encoding
mode to apply to emoji?

We were told time and time again when emoji were first proposed that
they were required for encoding for interoperability with Japanese
telecoms whose usage had spilled over to the internet. At that time
there was no suggestion that encoding emoji was anything other than a
one-off solution to a specific problem with PUA usage by different
vendors, and I at least had no idea that emoji encoding would become a
constant stream with an annual quota of 60+ fast-tracked
user-suggested novelties. Maybe that was the hidden agenda, and I was
just naïve.

The ESC and UTC do an appallingly bad job at regulating emoji, and I
would like to see the Emoji Subcommittee disbanded, and decisions on
new emoji taken away from the UTC, and handed over to a consortium or
committee of vendors who would be given a dedicated vendor-use emoji
plane to play with (kinda like a PUA plane with pre-assigned
characters with algorithmic names [VENDOR-ASSIGNED EMOJI XXXXX] which
the vendors can then associate with glyphs as they see fit; and as
emoji seem to evolve over time they would be free to modify and
reassign glyphs as they like because the Unicode Standard would not
define the meaning or glyph for any characters in this plane).

Andrew
Received on Thu Jan 24 2019 - 08:50:29 CST