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Comment by MichaelGG | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to be part of a big company, but it certainly helps. Especially if you want to stop a pentathalon or rifle character.

(Top result: http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/rifle-emoji-dropped-unicode-...)

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That's a shame.

Its one thing to have absolute, iron fisted control over your own platform - its another to intentionally seek to limit people's self expression on other platforms by influencing the standard in this way.

Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to have influence on what goes into Unicode? That doesn't make any sense. Also, if you read the article, Apple wasn't the only party in favor of nixing the emoji.

> Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to have influence on what goes into Unicode?

Obviously not.

You can think a company should have a say and still think it's windy to use that say in a particular way.

> Are you saying that a company with voting rights shouldn't be allowed to have influence on what goes into Unicode?

One might have a right to do something and yet be wrong to do it.

Apple had every right to do what they did, but they were completely, totally and undeniably in the wrong to do it. Everyone associated with their action should be ashamed. Honestly, they should all resign: their behaviour demonstrates that they have no business being associated with this sort of work.

Your comment is ridiculously extreme. They were not "undeniably" in the wrong. You think they were wrong, but that is an highly subjective opinion. In fact, I don't even agree that they were wrong to do this at all. I think it's perfectly reasonable to argue against the inclusion of more gun imagery in Unicode.

Also, if you think Apple was wrong, you must also think that Microsoft was (they voiced support), and everyone else at the meeting who agreed with the move. As the article says,

> Davis confirmed to BBC News on Monday that "there was consensus to remove" the emojis, but that he couldn't comment on the details.

So it's clearly not just Apple that thought this was the appropriate move.

Thank goodness for apple and other members which rejected the starter pistol/rifle proposal. Imagine how many mass shootings we've prevented by people not being able to communicate their plans using the rifle emoji.

Just like how North Korea isn't "undeniably" wrong in censoring speech to such an extreme. This is a very 1984-esque "solution" to a problem -- don't want to acknowledge positive use of guns? Good news, we can just erase them from our language! The way we treat emoji has some very serious similarities to Newspeak.

That's absurd. Nobody's censoring anything here. Apple not wanting to add a new gun emoji is in no way preventing you from talking about guns. Emoji isn't a replacement for English and nobody is forcing you to "speak" in all emoji.

Rifle is included in Unicode 9.0, just without emoji presentation.

What does this mean? How can an emoji not have an emoji presentation?

I assume they reserve the unicode character, but anyone who wants to use it decides what it looks like (so the rifle could look different on different platforms, which isn't a big issue)

This is always true for Emoji. The platforms always decide what their presentation of emoji will look like, just as they determine what font they will use for the unicode traditional letters. In this case, Apple and others decided they didn't want a rifle emoji, so it was moved to the 'black and white symbols' section so that those platforms wouldn't be 'missing' an emoji, which has other technical implications.

An emoji cannot be an emoji without having emoji presentation. There is a rifle character that resembles, in form and function, the other Olympic emoji, it's just not sitting in the set reserved for emoji. Any platform that wants to pick it up can use it, they can even put it next to all their other emoji if they want to. Apple, et al did not 'prevent' Rifle from being encoded. They just decided they wouldn't pick it up as an emoji for their platform, and the Unicode conference decided to move it to a different category based on that decision.

There are literally thousands of characters that Apple doesn't encode for their platforms. I haven't heard whether Apple will be supporting:

    Osage, a Native American language
    Nepal Bhasa, a language of Nepal
    Fulani and other African languages
    The Bravanese dialect of Swahili, used in Somalia
    The Warsh orthography for Arabic, used in North and West Africa
    Tangut, a major historic script of China

All of which were added to Unicode 9.

>The two characters will still be part of the Unicode spec, but they'll be classed as black-and-white "symbols" instead of regular emoji

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/06/apple-and-microsoft-pus...

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