Can we please get decentralized emoji?
It's silly that the symbols we use in our language are fixed and determined by a big company (or by a standardization committee for that matter).
Language should be free, and this includes its symbols.
It's silly that the symbols we use in our language are fixed and determined by a big company (or by a standardization committee for that matter).
Language should be free, and this includes its symbols.
BUT! I haven't seen a mention of which languages the submissions have to use. In fact, the process seems to be only described in English. That puts any culture where English knowledge is limited at a disadvantage. How is that even acceptable in an internationalization organization that influences worldwide standards?
Assuming you know English and want to be a member. To give voice to your culture when it comes to accepting emojis. You need to pay them 75 USD. Okay, that might be hard, but let's assume you managed. You click "join", and... It turns out you need a credit card. Not a local bank account, not even an IBAN account, not an e-peso, not anything that covers the methods of payments the little people use in half the world (there are even places in Europe where credit cards are somewhat expensive for people to have).
This obviously favors cultures where people are:
- rich
- English-speaking
- have easy access to credit cards
My pet theory says that Western sensibilities have led to a persistent lack of an emoji for 𓂸.
So yeah, please let's abandon Unicode emoji and let people decide from the bottom up.
In practice the big companies are more in charge. Apple changed the pistol to a water gun (mentioned in the article and at [0]), and now all the big emoji sets from Google/MS/FB/Twtr/etc. also have a water gun instead of a pistol.
Apple also succeeded at preventing the rifle emoji and the Modern Pentathlon emoji (which contained a rifle) from being included, apparently with support from MS.
[0]: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apple-and-the-gun-emoji/ [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/20/apple-rif...
It's pretty stupid how every other big tech company follows every single bad decision that Apple makes. Removing 3.5mm jack, removing pistol emoji, notches in screens, and now getting rid of chargers.
I personally do everything I can to boycott Unicode emoji. Some platforms like Slack/Discord allow for adding your own emoji which is nice. Language should not be controlled by a single entity.
Apple deliberately and unilaterally made the decision to represent this as a water pistol, despite this being clearly not representative of a typical pistol.
It's expected for individual entities implementing the Unicode emoji specification to exercise some amount of artistic merit, but if they're not at least in good faith attempting to represent the same type of object that the specification calls for, they are saying that they do not care about the decision that the Unicode Consortium made to allow emoji to be used to represent objects of that type, and that they should be the ones with the power to choose what can and cannot be said with emoji.
Twitter’s emoji is also open source: https://twemoji.twitter.com/
There's one more standard, but you could say that about any standardisation effort. These things take a really long time, trying again isn't a bad thing.
Most software standards (and even hardware to some extent) aren't that complicated, if you absolutely nail your design people will switch and yours may dominate. If it doesn't then there's no real harm done because no one's going to use it.
The xkcd works because unless everyone is willing to adopt the new standard, then you further fragment the market. There is zero evidence that the dominant players want to converge here (except maybe if everyone adopts their design!).
What we currently have is centralized in the silo-sense.
Emojis are part of font packs which are pretty standard and open via Open TrueType, no? Apple isn’t quite as simple to do that with (albeit possible via 3p keyboards, custom per-app fonts, or custom device profiles), but it still feels like I’m not understanding your complaint.