Re: Encoding italic

On 2019/01/24 23:49, Andrew West via Unicode wrote:
> On Thu, 24 Jan 2019 at 13:59, James Kass via Unicode
> <unicode_at_unicode.org> wrote:

> 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.

I don't think this was a hidden agenda. Nobody in the US or Europe
thought that emoji would catch on like they did, with ordinary people
and the press. Of course they had been popular in Japan, that's why the
got into Unicode.

> 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).

To a small extent, that already happens. The example I'm thinking about
is the transition from a (potentially bullet-carrying) pistol to a
waterpistol. The Unicode consortium doesn't define the meaning of any of
it's characters, and doesn't define stardard glyphs for characters, just
example glyphs. Another example is a presenter at a conference who was
using lots of emoji saying that he will need to redo his presentation
because the vendor of his notebook's OS was in the process of changing
their emoji designs.

Regards, Martin.
Received on Tue Jan 29 2019 - 04:05:41 CST