Hacker News Reader

Comment by goto11 | Hacker News Reader

I suspect emojis as characters will soon be replaced with graphics. Consumers are annoyed or confused when emojis look slightly different on different platforms.

View on HN

I think if you ship the font in your app to get consistent emoji renderings across platforms (no need to dump unicode for this) you might have appeased the people who want emojis to look the same on all platforms, but then you will enrage the people who want emojis on all of their apps to look the same.

So how much space will be wasted shipping a bunch of fonts that all include however many goddamned emojis there are?

Seems like the number is about 7MB[1] per font, looking at a real world example.

1. https://imgur.com/a/iMHYtjB

I suspect the latter is a significantly smaller group though - I would expect people care more about their messages coming across unchanged

Interesting. I’d think the opposite: I bet the number of times the average user looks at their own message on someone else’s device is pretty low, while they might have a chance to notice the differences in emoji between app A and app B on their own device several times per day.

> I bet the number of times the average user looks at their own message on someone else’s device is pretty low

That is not the issue. The issue is that users expect the emoji they send to look the same to the receiver.

Geeks know that emojis are "characters" and therefor might look slightly different in different fonts. But this is not how the average user sees it. They see emojis as small images and expect them to transfer unaltered just like any other image they put into a message.

I will regret this but... Animated ligature emojis or some sorta crontraption... Animated characters is the next stage. If emojis are different between carriers meh.

Course I find it silly that they swapped a real gun emoji for a water gun. How will my friends know I intend to go hunting and not play water guns with my nephews or whatever.

Uhh...perhaps try using actual words if you want to make your meaning clear? After all, if you used a "real gun" emoji, your friends might just think you were planning a massacre...

I usually do, I was kind of poking fun at how people use only emojis to talk, although with the sort of limits that Twitter and SMS has, you sometimes have to cut messages short. I meant using a single emoji in addition to other words.

Unified rendering is not really a goal of Unicode. That's better left to the individual platform providers, who have to balance this against keeping their own user experience consistent over time and across devices.

Yes, this is why I don't think Unicode is the right vehicle for emojis in the long run. They should be treated like graphics, not characters.

When they were really simple icons, it made sense to treat them as characters. But today they are detailed illustrations.

They have semantic value and can be included in document as characters. It makes sense to keep them as characters.

I'm confused. How would this solve the problem? Whilst looking different is clearly an issue (e.g. the gun being depicted a water gun), I'm not sure what your solution would look like? Images hosted somewhere? You'd get consistency, but you'd lose universality. It goes without saying, but you can use Emoji practically _anywhere_ that support text. That's huge.

Although it depends on having the same level of emoji support across all the relevant systems/devices. If you send a message with Unicode 13 emoji to me and I read it on my phone that's stuck on Unicode 10, it's not much use. Whereas if these silly little images were represented by links to a canonical repository somewhere, newly-added images could automatically work even in pre-existing systems.

On the other hand, that'd be dependent on connectivity.

Yeh, so the current system seems better, because, although it's versioned, it doesn't need to constantly communicate with some central server. Also, another drawback is fonts need to be updated, but again, I think the benefits outweigh the costs.

Arguably it might be better to include a limited, space-optimized vector image format (something like HVIF, Haiku Vector Icon Format[0]) along with text rather than try to enumerate emoji, although there are also advantages to the current approach (smaller size for supported characters and meaning indpendent of representation). For the web there is already data: url and similar inline image options would be possible in many situations even without the basic text format including images.

[0] https://blog.leahhanson.us/post/recursecenter2016/haiku_icon...

Art is very sensitive to copyright, so unlimited sharing of graphic artwork is still quite an unusual idea.

Not really, clip art is nothing new. Copyright doesn't mean you can't share stuff. It just means the owner of the copyright decides if you can.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com