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Comment by Drakim | Hacker News Reader

I've never quite understood the emoji thing, can somebody explain it to me? Why are "funny" symbols and pictures being put into the Unicode standard? I thought the point of extending the standard with symbols is to accommodate languages that use symbols for writing.

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Part of the reason Unicode exists (other than encoding every possible writing system) is to unify existing encodings. Emojis come from Japan where mobile operators used proprietary encodings to transmit emojis in text messages.

Ah, that makes a lot more sense! I thought we had people sitting around talking about what funny picture to put in Unicode next. It's much more understandable if it's something that already exists that's being "ported in".

I think we have that now. The Japanese emoji that have been standardized are kindda culturally skewed, but suddenly became very available world wide and a lot of people around the world want their culture to be represented equally. Hence the whole skin color deal.

And flags. The original japanese emoji set only has 10 country flags (japan, korea, germany, china, USA, france, spain, italy, russia and the UK), the Unicode consortium added 26 REGIONAL INDICATOR symbols used in pairs to encode territorial flags using CLDR region subtags e.g. U+1F1FA REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER U followed by U+ 1F1F8 REGIONAL INDICATOR SYMBOL LETTER S => 🇺🇸 (USA flag)

Frankly, I much prefer having 26 combining symbols over having to maintain a fixed list of country flags in the Unicode standard. That doesn't solve the problem of maintaining country flags but makes it Somebody Else's Problem, which is fine in my book.

It also lets you have a semi-decent fallback, where you can have some icon for "This was supposed to be the flag for country code XX but we don't know what that looks like."

It's because those "funny" symbols are needed in concise, informal communication on the internet. Smileys are very useful for conveying extra meaning, such as humor or sarcasm.

Normal people don't use /s :)

Your comment makes a weak case for this special symbol need, since it uses the :) smiley rather than the "Unicode Smiley"

HN filters some Unicode. Parent post may have used an emoji that got filtered out.

It's actually lack of application support for emojis on desktop.

But mobile devices, where you really want to be efficient when typing, do have support for Unicode smileys.

So my point still stands :)

:-) But even on a mobile device, if you used a Unicode smiley, the HN software would filter it out.

I wonder if it's just lack of proper Unicode support or some sort of protection against Unicode shenanigans.

Protection. Unicode is supported in general: éѲ報.

Unicode smiley, sure, but it would appear that not all emoji's are filtered: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202935

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