Re: Smiles, faces, etc

From: Doug Ewell (dewell@adelphia.net)
Date: Fri Feb 15 2002 - 03:05:51 EST


Harry Davis a.k.a. "Falkor" <Falkor@spamcop.net> wrote:

> There are two face characters in the Miscellaneous group.

Actually, three: U+2639, U+263A, and U+263B. (Not to mention U+3020.)

> Was wondering if
> it would be appropriate to expand upon those two, possibly in its own
block,
> and add a series of smiles/faces/emoticons to the unicode standard.

Sounds like we have a potential Bytext user:

    http://www.bytext.org/The_Bytext_Standard.pdf (pages 31-33)

> Like 'em or hate 'em, those " :) " are here to stay. ...and there's
at
> least twelve easily identifiable faces in common use on the internet.

If you want to consider these things from a Unicode encoding
perspective, you have to conclude that most of these twelve (or however
many) are glyph variants. For example, :), :-), and :^) are all
variants of U+263A; the nose differences are not significant.

Basically, no more than about four of these are really useful, except
maybe for WAREZ D00DZ. Like many others, I once had a list of about 50
or 60 emoticons. Once you get past the smile, the winky smile, the
frown, and the "Mr. Bill" open mouth :-o there is not much left except
minor variants and stupid things like "man with glasses and a mohawk
sticking his tongue out and drooling."

You can always try submitting a proposal, of course, but I just don't
think user demand is that high for U+xxxx DROOLING FACE.

-Doug Ewell
 Fullerton, California



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