> what is needed to cover character encoding already in broad usage.
That isn't true anymore though, is it? At least Emoji seem like a case where inclusion precedes use and noth the other way around.
That isn't true anymore though, is it? At least Emoji seem like a case where inclusion precedes use and noth the other way around.
Japanese feature phone market was weaponizing lack of emoji support in modern smartphones to chase them out, but iPhone happened anyway and Apple started incorporating their own fragmenting SoftBank-iPhone-specific implementation into iOS so Google pushed it all to Unicode to fix them all up. They wanted to capture user emails into Gmail, and all emojis sent from featurephones being replaced with = by gateways was problematic.
1: https://blog.emojipedia.org/apples-emoji-evolution-1997-2018...
Emoji yes, the new emoji we get in annual Unicode updates, not...
1. Some large-userbase OS+messaging services provider, like Apple or Microsoft, sends a “proposal” for some new codepoints to the Unicode Consortium. The explicit message is “do you think these are worth standardizing?” But the implicit message is more unilateral: “we’re giving you advance notice, that we’re planning on including this emoji in our fonts + supporting it in our messengers, whether you like it or not, and whether it’s inter-compatible with anyone else’s systems or not. If you don’t standardize it, we’ll encode it using the Private-Use Area.”
2. Given the Unicode Consortium’s goal of never having proprietary text bits flying around the Internet — and given these big service providers’ histories of running messaging services (e.g. MSN Messenger) that did use proprietary encodings for emoji, resulting in some lasting problems with digital archaeology — the Unicode Consortium feel pressured by this “proposal” to standardize the proposed emoji codepoints, whether they really think they’re “worth” being standardized or not.
3. The Consortium also then feel pressured to get a new standard revision out quickly, to get ahead of the planned usage by these service-providers (because that usage would have to be encoded somehow, and if they don’t give the service-provider a codepoint to use by the time they ship their new font version that includes the relevant emoji, they’ll just have to make up their own.) In most cases, the Unicode Consortium is reactive to existing usage, allowing them to judge whether there is real existing adoption of a symbol; but here, they have to be proactive, pushing out a standard that includes a codepoint before knowing whether anyone will use it.
As a result, you’ll see these large dumps of new emoji where Apple/Microsoft/Google/etc. just decided autocratically that the world needed some more emoji, and Unicode begrudgingly followed along. It’s like what happened when Unicode first absorbed the emoji codepoints of Japanese feature-phones; but happening just-in-time, one at a time. (If those Japanese feature-phone manufacturers kept introducing new emoji, they’d have had to absorb those just-in-time too.)
There’s a separate, much more sensible and deliberate process the Unicode Consortium goes through you’re a regular-sized actor who’s not attempting to strong-arm them, where you do tend to have to prove existing use in either analogue documents, or as part of some proprietary digital text format.
[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17206-emoji-and-vendors.pdf
[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2019/19068r-powerline-syms.pdf
Would you consider this to be a very different thing from, say, a MiniDisc? Yet there is an Emoji for that.
Obviously we cannot include every picture possible in Unicode, but there certainly seems to be demand for a lot of them. Besides really enjoying their use in texting, I've also come across a lot of professional uses as well.
Yes, this means that the Unicode Consortium probably has needed to adapt their original mission a bit, but I don't see the harm in that.
MiniDisc makes sense for two reasons. First, because it's a legacy inclusion. Second, because absolutely, you might use it in a text message. "Don't forget to bring over your bitchin collection of [MiniDisc] on Thursday!"
This is an important point that most technical people miss. They want to turn Unicode into a cross-platform FontAwesome. That's not what it's for.
There are a lot of specific-use symbols in Unicode (chess pieces, for example), but those are legacy inclusions because many of those symbols were included in computers before the internet.
I think that's also a distinction often missing in technical people's assumptions about Unicode and why it isn't just a cross-platform "FontAwesome" even just of legacy proto-FontAwesomes like Wingdings (which is also included and is its own different story). Unicode Consortium likes proposals to include things such as scanned documents of "here's how this 1850s book used chess symbols in the flow of text to communicate how the game is played". Not as adornments or images or separate figures, but directly as a part of the text.
That was one of the things that the Power Symbol Proposal [1] that was heavily discussed on HN in the past (and sort of spun out of HN comments in the first place) wound up learning and realizing how big that was to Unicode Consortium's needs in a proposal. "How was this used in real examples in the flow of text?" Finding and being able to cite and scan real world examples from text books and help documentation is an important part of the process. Even the chess pieces were about communicating to other people, in the flow of text in historic books and magazine articles and discussions.
Things like half stars was added by petition similar to TFA, so my post should have been more nuanced.
The point is that the reason why there is a seemingly useless emoji and not the [insert character you really want] is usually because one is preexisting and the other isn’t.