The battle within Unicode over a frowning poo emoji | Hacker News Reader

The battle within Unicode over a frowning poo emoji

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20 pointsjenny8lee7 comments

At least they mention that emojis exist in unicode to make compatibility with text encoded on japanese phones.

I suppose the reason why Apple followed Softbank reference images and not KDDI or DoCoMo (last one would probably have been the closest to an authority on the matter, yet not mentioned) is because iPhones were originally released only on Softbank in Japan, and emoji were a originally a japan-only feature on the iPhone.

Why would they follow KDDIs reference images when emoji was a feature for Softbank costumers?

This isn't a meaningful observation or anything, but you used both "emojis" and "emoji" as the plural of "emoji". My brain tripped over that for some reason.

At first I thought maybe it was just autocorrect, but after rereading my comment a few times, I think I was thinking of emojis as a series of images in one paragraph and as a concept in another, hence the lack of plural S for the concept

Seems like one big simplification would be to make a bunch of base “characters” (face, poo, dog, etc) and a bunch of combining characters (smiling, frowning, crying etc).

The current crop could be precomposed characters.

Agreed, seems like an obvious solution since they already have the joining character defined for this purpose: https://emojipedia.org/emoji-zwj-sequences/

the obvious solution imo is to add an emotional modifier as with the skin tone modifier

that would allow essentially any emoji object to be assigned emotions, sad car needs repairs, angry envelope is a bill, etc

but then the same question, where does it end, are we trying to replace the whole range of actual language with likely ambiguous pictographs? what is the purpose of emoji?

I believe Tom Scott (YouTuber) also proposed a vomit Modifier.

Vomit poop emoji is really disgusting stuff.

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