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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what fringe diversity group has gotten their new custom emojis accepted this time.

Does Unicode care about actual languages any more?

If you aren't going to post substantively, don't post at all. We're asked you several times before and eventually we ban accounts that won't follow the guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I actually went into this post fully expecting to make the same snarky comment, but upon actually reading the article, they added 554 characters and 4 new scripts, along with stuff like Egyptian hieroglyph formatting support, vs. 61 emojis. Which made the idea of snarking about how they only cared about emojis look rather silly.

Anyway, since you asked, the fringe diversity group getting the new custom emojis is disabled people (mainly hearing-impaired, vision-impaired, and wheelchair users). So, y'know, on the order of 10% of the population. Very fringe.

Well, as the linked post says in the first paragraph, almost 90% of the 554 new characters aren’t emoji, and include four new scripts (used by several different languages) and additions for several other scripts. Emoji are only mentioned once in the first half of the article, and unless you consider accessibility-related emoji to be only for a “fringe diversity group”, I’m not sure how the newly added emoji [0] could be particularly controversial?

[0] http://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-released.html

And only 14 of the new emoji are related to accessibility, of which 6 are gender-specific.

The rest is stuff like garlic and yo-yo. I mean think of yo-yoers what you will but I don't think they're a fringe diversity group :p.

It's about half-way into the post that it talks about emoji and not actual languages, so the answer is pretty obviously yes.

Given this release adds several new scripts, which actual languages do you think they don't care enough about? (+ of course there being several groups of people involved, so it's not an either/or thing)

The whole emoticon thing have became ridiculous. It's time for Unicode to split and let the kids playing with their images and to focus on more important, textual things. For example the cuneiform block is not detailed enough to be used by scholars.

Do you think that the committee approving new emojis is qualified to seamlessly transition into discussing the minutiae of cuneiform formatting? It may be a guess on my part, but I'm pretty confident that there are two different (and probably non-overlapping) sets of people working on these two areas.

Perhaps Unicode could solve the emoji problem once and for all by providing a mechanism for encoding arbitrary .svgs as multi-kilobyte strings of modifier characters.

Emojis started being included in Unicode because they were already in the text encodings used by Japenese SMS. Multi-kb glyphs wouldn't exactly fly in SMS.

I dunno, by wildly extrapolating current trends, by 2050 a typical text-based message will already consume several MB of bloat, Javascript, subliminal advertisements, superliminal advertisements, JSONs encoding XML encoding JSONs encoding base64 encodings of..., 128-bit float variable font settings, prayers to the Packet Gnomes, and more Javascript.

In comparison, a few extra kb won't seem so bad.

Japan has never widely adopted SMS[0]. They have always used proper internet E-mail instead, and more lately, LINE messenger.

[0]Once they added global 3G/UMTS support their networks got SMS support, but it's only used by phone number verification services and 2FA, nobody actually sends them. Their homegrown 2G networks before that launched messaging using E-mail.

Hmm, they did include that block for encoding arbitrary bitmap images. (U+2800)

U+2800 etc. is for Braille, which is an alphabet. Nothing to do with bitmaps.

I think it was a joke referring to some people using Braille to display black and white images as text, e.g. https://loveeevee.github.io/Dots-Converter/retro.html

Yeah. Key to that use is that they didn't pick any specific patterns, they went with every possible combination of 8 dots being present/absent.

Nitpick: the U+2800 block specifically isn’t an alphabet. For example, U+2801 is called “Braille Pattern dots-1”. That’s like calling U+0069 “vertical bar with a dot on top”, rather than “Latin small letter I”

(Reason for that is that the dot patterns are heavily overloaded and even language specific. German digits are different from US ones, for example)

Of course I know this is two different committees. I'm not talking about that level of separation but splitting Unicode in Unicode proper and the emoji in another standard. Emoji standardisation is orthogonal to encoding present and past writing systems once the set of existing Japanese emoji were encoded. So it became a shit show as soon as the standard created previously non-exiting characters as emoji. In comparison, if you create your own alphabet it won't be included, so newly created emoji should be treated in the same way: being excluded of the standard.

Until there's an emoji representing every imaginable demographic group engaged in every imaginable activity, the Unicode is not complete.

In what way is the Cuneiform block insufficiently detailed?

Variants. There is a lot of differences in the form of characters given time and place and writing. Scholars want to be able to reproduce text with fidelity so the current standard is insuffisant for them (I heard that from a scholar in that field). In a way it is similar to the issue created by Unihan. Abstractly the unified characters are 'the same' but people still want to see them displayed with a given shape.

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