Emoji, part 6c: to infinity and beyond? | Hacker News Reader

Emoji, part 6c: to infinity and beyond?

shadycharacters.co.uk

31 pointsbreadbox31 comments

The 8-part series this comes from (starting here [1]) was a really good read. Very informative, regardless of one's stance on emoji.

[1] https://shadycharacters.co.uk/2018/08/emoji-part-1-in-the-be...

I wonder if doing this in Unicode was a huge mistake.

Reading this article seems to me we are pulling the thread of a sweater, and getting caught in an unsolvable intersection of intersectionalist social issues (pun intended!). FYI I'm not taking sides other than to say we live in an actually diverse world and people have different social mores wether we like them or not, this talk will never end.

Maybe we should just have allowed 'svg' images into text, and you pick whatever you want to send to that person, and they see what you sent and that's that.

Then anyone can do anything, publicly, privately, whatever.

It's already getting hard with Emojis getting into text and passwords, it's making it just ugly.

Everyone could then 'do their own' thing and that's it.

We also could be past the peak of this emoji trend, they are here to stay in some ways, but I don't think the specificity is really that-that important. We just don't use most of these characters very often at all.

Alternately:

We have all this unused space with which to send characters.

Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?

"Why not use it, to reduce bandwidth?"

Because 'bandwidth' and 'extra unicode spaces' are effectively irrelevant to the situation.

This is a very common psychological dilemma among engineers - we tend to think of 'sizes we can measure' and 'performance'. When often the issues are not relevant.

It would be like adding a $500 gadget to your car that hangs out the back to go 0.01 cents better fuel mileage.

Emojis are turning into a mess - every time I grab user content these days, I have to flush for weird combinations of characters.

Worse: the representation is not only different in terms of images, but some editors combine Emojis differently - resulting in different numbers of characters.

There should be 20 emojis - they should be in the BMP (not extended char set) - and that should be it.

Then, otherwise, you send SVGs. You get the added benefit of having 'whatever you want'. If there are some common rules around image sizes etc. we could be ok. SVGs are generally small thankfully. Much bigger than text, but still relatively small.

> It would be like adding a $500 gadget to your car that hangs out the back to go 0.01 cents better fuel mileage.

Except that it doesn't cost you anything if you don't use it.

> Emojis are turning into a mess - every time I grab user content these days, I have to flush for weird combinations of characters.

Why? This I don't understand. You have user content, it has emoji—so what? How does that affect your ability to process it as-is?

Has anyone here integrated emoji web picker in their website/web app? What's the recommended flow.

I see that the library by OneSignal is rated high[1], but it's 2 years since updated; I guess it misses out on few emoji sprites.

Isn't it high time input type=emoji is made a standard or is it a bad idea?

[1]:https://github.com/OneSignal/emoji-picker

Emojis are what normal people consider "characters," not entire fields unto themselves. Would input=emoji accept pure emoji without text? What if people want to mix emojis and normal text?

> Emojis are what normal people consider "characters"

I'm pretty sure emoji are what normal people consider images. Their implementation as characters is a mistake, and the source of several problems that normal people have with them. (Most notably, imagining that the person you're talking to sees the same thing you sent.)

If emoji are images, then Chinese characters are images. Each emoji has a meaning on its own, and can have different meanings in context. There are combinations of emojis (emoji "sentences" if you will) representing complex concepts.

I feel like emoji input is better handled by the user's OS, so that each website out there doesn't need to reinvent the wheel and keep it up to date.

But, that said, I'm not sure what support is like for such things. About the best I've seen is OS X's character input. (The dialog that appears on Command+Control+Space.) Linux has IBus, but it could be better. I've no idea if Windows ever grew anything. (I haven't used it since about Vista.)

Windows 10 got an emoji picker some time ago, opened by `Win+period` or `Win+semicolon`.

it's okay, except that the emoji search seems to use the current keyboard language and not the system language, which is kind of annoying. I don't want to have to remember which language my keyboard is set to to search for a plane emoji!

Shouldn’t the OS allow emoji (or arbitrary unicode) input? macOS & iOS do, and probably many others.

Wrike has an emoji picker, but we don't use it much in our group because it's so small that it's hard to make out what the characters are supposed to be.

Important to point out that the linked article, in addition to being highly-informative and well-researched is also an exemplary application of type design worthy of emulation.

If you’re running a SAAS business you can admire it; if you publish a blog or editorial site by all means copy it.

However if the entire point of your article is to talk about how emoji look, it's a terrible idea to include them verbatim when discussing a specific design.

It's clear that in certain cases the article talks about a reference design or how the emojis are supposed to look. They likely checked in a browser on macOS to make sure it reads correctly, too.

But good luck if you're on Windows or Android. Apparently the Microsoft mage is a wizard with a white beard. Not exactly "gender neutral".

A regression to hieroglyphics, a collation and rendering nightmare, a security morass, AND a volley in the culture wars...

Unicode is the gift that keeps on giving.

Why should we blame Unicode for this? Emoji-like features were used for a long time on Internet forums, in SMS-like mobile apps, and even as "dingbats" in printed text. Emojis in Unicode are simply standardizing support for this long-term practice and making it interoperable across systems.

>regression

how? it's just another way to communicate a thought/feeling/idea.

We really need a non-broken universal character set. Is anyone actually working on that?

Yes, that's what the Unicode consortium is doing.

If you look at https://unicode.org/versions/Unicode12.0.0/ you will see that emoji is just a small part of it.

I know that there is some controversy, in particular regarding han unification, but in practice, Unicode works well enough.

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