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Comment by nixpulvis | Hacker News Reader

I love how iOS doesn't understand this URL, and still doesn't have these characters. Too busy removing the Taiwanese flag, and implementing "Animojis".

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I still think unicode should not have added emojis. The big guys are adding animated emojis now, and that's clearly out of scope for character sets. If they continue down that path unicode will eventually become SVG with animation. IMHO they should have stopped short of emojis.

While I agree with your sentiment, can you define "emoji"?

A graphical or iconographic concept that cannot be unambiguously represented by a single character in any natural language and which does not have a single standardized rendering (e.g. the Power symbol does have a single standard rendering and is therefore not an emoji).

I'm no character or Unicode expert - that's just a wild stab in the dark, largely based on why I dislike emoji being in Unicode.

I still prefer ASCII style smilies to emojies ;-)

I promise to never do that on HN again!

My sister pointed out that I'm a little random about mixing them. I use both, based solely on what I feel like typing at the time. And I'm acutely aware that the emojis she sees are not the ones I do, but the ASCII ones are pretty much the same, since I use Android and she's an Apple-head.

Besides, I love the slobbering ASCII guy ;-p~~~~ None of the emojis let you amplify slobber according to need like that.

One emoji I wish I had a good ASCII alternative for is :thinking: U+1F914. There is :^) but only the skype generation will make sense of that.

I've changed my emoji writing style from the canonical ;) to ; ) just so that editors won't auto "correct" my proper ASCII emoji into an unholy yellow winking face.

That is a great tip! I wish I had thought of that : )

Now? Emoji were animated even before they were added to Unicode https://emojipedia.org/softbank/2006/

Animoji is very different from using an animated gif in place of an emoji.

I didn't take it the GP was talking about Animoji, as those are motion-captured, rendered in 3D and sent as pre-rendered video files (GP mentioned something that could be represented as animated SVG). I don't think anyone is proposing a way to encode facial motion-capture into Unicode.

whether you like the emojis or not, they've certainly helped to drive unicode adoption. Good luck making the business case for why you're building support for some obscure international character set into your product, but tell somebody you're adding support for the latest emojis and all of a sudden having unicode 10 support is a big deal.

> whether you like the emojis or not, they've certainly helped to drive unicode adoption.

Especially since many of them are outside the BMP, so adoption forced people to go beyond UCS-2.

I'm glad they decided to be inclusive since 100-200 million people were using emoji before they got added to unicode and without adding them all of those people's conversations and communication patterns would have been pissed on and likely those countries with high populations of people using them would never have switched to unicode because their customers would have demanded to keep them which would mean we'd have the nightmare of multiple encodings again. No thanks.

I love emoji and have since I started using them in 1999 (weren't added to unicode til 2010). Most of my friends and family love them, it makes their communication richer and more easily nuanced so I'm really glad they were added.

IMO Unicode shouldn't have ever added characters with color. Let color be the property of the markup. The original emoji were all monochrome, and mainly displayed on monochromatic flip-phone screens. The fact that there now exist emoji that are otherwise identical but have different color is absolutely idiotic.

In Unicode, they're represented by a combination of emoji character + colour character, not by new characters: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Diversity

Seems a decent solution to me. Monochrome screens can just ignore the colour character.

There are at least 7 variations of the heart symbol ️ differing only in color ️🧡, not including the heart (playing card) which also has multiple variations.

Edit: apparently HN limits the number of emoji per post, I originally included several.

https://emojipedia.org/white-heart/

There are 27 variations of the capital letter A in Unicode (see the confusable list https://unicode.org/cldr/utility/confusables.jsp?a=A&r=None).

Redundancy has never been a problem with Unicode. After the decision was made to add the symbols of the original encoding to the list of Unicode characters, they had to add all heart variation, otherwise it wouldn't have been able to be backward compatible.

Or alternatively add a color modifier? I'm not sure that would have been a better solution.

> apparently HN limits the number of emoji per post, I originally included several.

I am surpeised HN allows any emoji an all. Pretty sure they have been totally banned in the past. It seems like the orange heart is now (or has always been) whitelisted. 🧡🧡🧡

That doesn't add colour to, say, the smiley face, it just changes the colour from the default, usually yellow.

As well as adding colour browsers display emoji at a larger point size. It is really annoying when some pre-emoji symbol (like the phases of the moon in TFA) gets emojified and where your document had some discreet use of symbols it now has huge colourful icons drawing the eye.

And afaict there is no way of turning off this behaviour globally.

> The original emoji were all monochrome

Emoji were in color before they were added to Unicode. Even the original iPhone 3G Emoji release pre-dated their addition to Unicode (Apple used the SoftBank encoding). They were even in color on flip phones as far back as 1999 https://emojipedia.org/softbank/1999/

At a certain point it becomes much simpler to encode your "text" as SVG rather than use a convoluted and bloated standard like Unicode.

For 99% of all development, Unicode is a non-issue. Perhaps you have to consider Right-To-Left support and that is about it. Even then good RTL support is more about page layout than the actual mechanics of displaying the text.

If you have a better idea to enable people around the world to use computers in any language that doesnt look something like Unicode, I’m sure everybody will adopt it.

I get that I'm in a minority here, but I'm not even sure such a thing is necessary or a good idea. Generally speaking simple things are better than complex things, and from a computing perspective human written languages are ludicrously complicated. I'm not convinced that complicating all our software to support poop emoji is better than allowing human language to adapt to the medium in the manner it has done since language was first written down.

> For 99% of all development, Unicode is a non-issue.

Until it suddenly is an issue. Like, dealing with unpaired surrogates in Windows file paths.

I mean, we're talking about an encoding where you need a rather large database and quite a bit of code just to tell how many characters are actually in a string.

Replacing Unicode characters with SVG representations would be terrible for accessibility.

Seriously, try sending a link to this page to a friend on iMessage... they won't be able to click it.

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