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Comment by asgard1024 | Hacker News Reader

Unicode kinda jumped the shark with all the emoji.. they might as well encode all frequent words/meanings.

Though I like them. The only emoticon(s) I always miss is for one "shrug", something like either "I don't know" or "I don't care".

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One of the principles of Unicode is 1:1 round-trip-encoding to every other encoding, which is why there's so many pre-composed letters and accents even though the individual letters and accents are available separately.

All the encoded emoji have been used for decades by Japanese phones; it's certainly not as well-thought-out as the rest of Unicode, but Apple and Google needed to have some common representation of those characters in their Unicode-based software so they could interoperate with Japanese telecommunications infrastructure. Adding emoji to Unicode was the least terrible option.

I've seen Unicode characters for Facebook, Twitter, etc. icons. So far, they've been in user-defined fonts, in user-defined expansion space. But I suspect there will be pressure to put them in the standard.

The original set of emoji used in Japanese phones had ten characters reserved for country flags, but as you can imagine ISO were very much not keen to include one particular set of countries to the exclusion of all the others, or to specify a particular flag design for a particular country. The solution they went with was to add 26 "regional indicator symbol" characters, and if you use those flag-code characters to spell an ISO country-code, rendering software is supposed to look up the current flag of the named country and display it.

If they went to such lengths to avoid adding flags to the spec, imagine how much pushback you'd get for trying to add company logos.

Unicode wants to go on for decades. They don't want to become a shrine to obsolete corporate logos.

Private Use is a fine place for logos.

Another missing symbol is the Unicode logo.

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