Hacker News Reader

Comment by deepfriedrice | Hacker News Reader

Random question: Why are there so many emoji "implementations"? I understand copyright, but is it really cheaper/easier/preferable for all these different companies to design their own emojis?

View on HN

For the same reason that there are many fonts. Unicode only defines codepoints, like "UPSIDE-DOWN FACE U+1F643", similar to how it only defines "U+0041 LATIN CAPITAL A".

I for one believe it was a very stupid idea to standardize emoji, but here we are.

I think standardization opened a whole new way of communication but yeah some parts are messed up

While emoji may seem trivial, I see no reason why it shouldn't be standardized. It is a widely used method of text communication with a large number of common symbols.

Lots of writing systems that humans have invented are pretty bad, and their digital implementations are sometimes even worse, but Unicode has to live with all of them.

Before emoji were in Unicode, it was difficult to display Japanese e-mails correctly on anything that wasn't a Japanese mobile phone.

The alternative would be (almost) everyone just using the font with most emoji in order to support messages from other platforms, so sort of a standardization that nobody can rely on. I don't see how that's preferable.

I think what emoji symbolizes is the failure of not having a ubiquitous format for rich text. Ideally you'd embed custom smily graphics. See also how people abuse mathematical symbols for "bold" or "italic" text.

Unicode has more than enough space and text is rarely a blip on the amount of traffic carried on the internet, emojis are fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com