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Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Can someone comment with relevant experience about the fact that maybe emojis should not be part of unicode? And that we should literally just send tiny images as part of text?

This way, you know the host system is 100% going to represent what you want to say correctly, that the emoji will look right, and you don't need to worry the system will replace it, that it supports it etc..

And you can literally use 'any emoji' you want.

There is an infinite number of things we can put in emojis, why are we trying to standardize such things?

I wonder if someone has some insight as to the history around this?

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Emoji was supported for a long time on Japanese phones. Apple wanted to sell iPhones in Japan, so they implemented emojis using Unicode's Private Use Area which initially was a feature only available in Japan, but people quickly figured out how to use them outside of Japan.

Emojis became a rather popular feature of iPhones, and Android wanted to have emojis as well, however using Private Use Area just like iPhones did wasn't ideal, so they made a proposal to Unicode Consortium to encode emojis in Unicode.

Later, there was a lot of demand to add new emojis, so more and more emojis got encoded into the standard.

Oh, I understand all of that of course. I meant some kind of Unicode-specific debate over how it should all work and what the alternatives were.

> Emoji was supported for a long time on Japanese phones

nit: the west did not wait for emoji to add pictorial representations in text.

Dingbats are centuries old, and they’ve been part of unicode from the start.

> Emoji was supported for a long time on Japanese phones.

The Unicode folks should have stopped at supporting the legacy symbol set. It would have been perfectly reasonable.

At this point emojis have become a weed, which any random idea and variation seemingly being accepted.

I doubt Unicode wants them to be part of it.

But how it works is that big players send them an advance notice ultimatum which comes down to “Standardize it accordingly, or we'll do it in a nonstandard, hackey fashion ourselves.”, which would cause undesirable chaos.

It is indeed a most inelegant situation.

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