2015: The Year of Emoji Diversity | Hacker News Reader

2015: The Year of Emoji Diversity

blog.emojipedia.org

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I don't get the point of building Emoji into unicode. A browse of the Emojipedia suggests that supposedly standard characters look so different on different platforms as to potentially have completely different meanings to sender and receiver.

The Emojipedia itself is full of strange cultural assumptions. Following the links in the text to 'men and women,' two women holding hands could represent lesbians or 'best friends,' while two men holding hands are only considered as a gay couple - ignoring the numerous cultures where such behavior is simply considered companionable. Trying to formalize this into an international language standard looks like a recipe for toxic politics with a side of technological confusion.

> The Emojipedia itself is full of strange cultural assumptions.

Completely agreed. Despite this though, emoji have been a net win. Everyone was using emoticons anyway, but there was no way to use them between devices (gmail sending emoticons as attachments in emails springs to mind). Now we can send them via text message in all major smartphone OSs and they're used on Twitter etc. There's clearly a cultural demand for them, as they've become a part of the way we communicate, so standardisation is a good thing. Whether unicode is the place to do it though... I don't know, but I don't know who else could either, and it's not like there's a lack of code points in the unicode spec for it.

or, we could use simple ASCII text to fit this purpose ;)

> I don't get the point of building Emoji into unicode.

Yeah, I thought the purpose of unicode was to provide a character-encoding standard for all human writing systems in current use. Emoji aren't a writing system. Are they included for some legacy reason?

Yes. Back in the days when the Japanese phone industry was an island unto itself, they had a 16-bit custom character encoding and not enough common characters to fill it, so various manufacturers stuck UI icons and other assorted pictures in there. A decade or so later, when Apple and Google wanted a piece of the market, for interoperability reasons they had to support all the same glyphs. Since both iOS and Android are unicode-based, the easiest thing was to get them officially added to Unicode.

There's already stuff like Linear B and even alchemical symbols in Unicode, so it's not not just for current writing systems. Anyway, four-byte characters give you plenty of room to cram in whatever junk seems useful at the time. It's big enough to handle a little scope creep.

>The Emojipedia itself is full of strange cultural assumptions.

You were not kidding. First sentence encountered on the site is: "Emoji is the type of emoticon used on iPhone, iPad, Android, Mac OS X and Windows."

For what it's worth, Unicode itself does not utilize those assumptions and that probably matters more than how Emojipedia.org interprets them. Those characters are simply referred to as "Two Women Holding Hands" and "Two Men Holding Hands" in the specification.

I think the beauty is that many of the characters can have several different meanings depending on context and culture.

I'm not against people doing weird stuff, so all these smileys and putting them in every new mobile app and all that stuff is fine. I don't like it, but it's just my opinion, so that's fine.

But what I'm really against is spoiling one of the most important of all standards we have now with that. I consider a bit questionable the fact that emoji (and other inconsistent symbol sets) are built into unicode already, but considering the time it was done and the origin of those symbols that's somewhat OK. But, srsly, guys, racial diversity for some smileys in the unicode? Really? Why not racial diversity for Pacman? It's crazy, really. It's some symbols that even shouldn't actually be there (in the unicode, I mean).

I guess we really should see that as a problem. Unicode is a complicated standard. Actual encodings of unicode even more so. Imperfect programs working on imperfect systems, trying to support that stuff, rendering engines rendering that stuff, countless font formats and protocols having to deal with that stuff and et cetera, et cetera — even more so. And unless we are forking unicode itself with purpose to make "coding standard for sane people" (and if we are sane, we are NOT doing it for obvious reasons) we must to be thinking about supporting all insane stuff introduced into unicode itself, because it is the reason for standards to exist in the first place — to be covered by implementations. So introducing all that complicated stuff without any real reason is a big problem, and we should be worried, because it's us who will suffer from awful standards later, and not some guys with fancy hairstyles doing business with mtv and stuff.

So you want colorful smileys? Use imaging file formats, goddammit. PNG, SVG. Invent your own markup standard (like {smiley12:asian}) to be used with all sorts of tweeting apps. Don't mess with encoding standards.

Cannot something be done about that?

Crazy. The Fitzpatrick scale[0] has 6 entries but they've decided to lump the white people together as pink people. I know it's not 'racist' but why not just use the 6 different levels on the scale.

[0] It's fantastic to enable skin tone colours (although technically I think it's a nightmare) I just hope that I can choose colours that match my skin.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale

I see three different faces on the mockup that could be considered Caucasian. What RGB value(s) do you think need to be added to achieve sufficient diversity?

Right now the source of truth for Emoji icons is Apple's icon set. I think we need an open source alternative to that. There should be a set of free and open source icons for emoji.

There is http://emojione.com/.

I'd dare say the source of truth for Emoji is somewhere in a cabinet in NTT Docomo's headoffice.

But when will we have an option to change colour of suit in the MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING character?

Or the color of PILE OF POO.

I got the impression that, for those emoji with multiple people (for example holding hands) there will be variations with the 5 skin color modifiers - that's 25 (if order matters) new characters to represent the permutations of one emotion.

We should go back to ":)"

WTF? When a character is rendered onto a bitmap it is either there or not. Where the heck does colour come from? (Aside from AA, Unicode doesn't define that anyway.) Why on earth is Unicode putting a picture into its encoding?

It's not – it's adding emoji modifier characters, much like there are already modifiers for adding accents to letters. These characters act to alter existing emoji – in this case, specifying the skin tone.

The goal is to add additional semantic information to an emoji character. It's an interesting idea.

It would be interesting to see emojis being designed from a more ground up perspective:

Take a set of emotions, take pictures of people from various cultures/ethnicities expressing those emotions - use some representative sample strategy. Publish the database of pictures. Try forming rules for how people generally express those emotions given relevant variables. Encode the resulting space into some clever bytecode representation. Now you have a basis for representing the semantics of emoticons, an alphabet if you will.

Ugh. Diversity, or dragging along the baggage of thousands of years of racism into the 21st century. A smiley is yellow. That is not white, black or Asian. Giving smilies skin color is taking us back to a darker time.

I've been seeing this around the web today, but sort of assumed it was a joke. Is this serious? Can't they all just be made to look like characters from The Simpsons and then, I don't know, maybe people can get on with some more important work?

I guess the current set of glyphs from Apple/Microsoft/Twitter/Google shows why this is difficult: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/full-emoji-list.html

Most of the "simple" things, like smiling/frowning/teardrop use yellow smileys. But there are also some emoji like boy/girl/man with turban/police officer which seem to call for less abstraction, and then the artist has to pick a skin tone.

I didn't realize there were 1430 of them. It reminds me of clipart shovelware when CD-ROMs were a new thing and people felt a need to fill up all that empty space with...stuff.

I guess people's definitions of "important" can differ. Emoji are used in communication between many millions of people every day all across the world. Sounds pretty important to me!

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