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Emoji.length == 2

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Re: Emoji.length == 2

#21

The thing that frustrates me the most about Unicode emoji is the astounding number of combining characters. For combining characters in written languages, you can do an NFC normalization and, with moderate success, get a 1 codepoint = 1 grapheme mapping, but "Emoji 2.0" introduced some ridiculous emoji compositions with the ZWJ character. To use the author's example: ‍woman - 1 codepoint black woman - 2 codepoints, w…

Man, imagine if you could compose chinese characters out of radicals like this. I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing.

The ideographic description characters do provide a way to describe how to map radicals into characters, but don't actually provide rendering in such a manner.

There is active discussion on actually being able to build up complex grapheme clusters in such a manner, because it's necessary for Egyptian and Mayan text to be displayed properly. U+13430 and U+13431 have been accepted for Unicode 10.0 already for some Egyptian quadrat construction.

Re: Emoji.length == 2

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, imagine if you could compose chinese characters out of radicals like this. I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing.

The ideographic description characters do provide a way to describe how to map radicals into characters, but don't actually provide rendering in such a manner. There is active discussion on actually being able to build up complex grapheme clusters in such a manner, because it's necessary for Egyptian and Mayan text to be displayed properly. U+13430 and U+13431 have been accepted for Unicode 10.0 already for some Egyp…

Doesn't it already exist to an extent? That's pretty much how Korean is built isn't it?

Re: Emoji.length == 2

#24
Before emoji, fonts and colors were independent. Combining the two creates a mess. Try using emoji in an editor with syntax coloring. We got into this because some people thought that single-color emoji were racist.[1] So now there are five skin tone options. The no-option case is usually rendered as bright yellow, which comes from the old AOL client. They got it from the happy-face icon of the 1970s.

Here's the current list of valid emoji, including upcoming ones being added in the next revision.[2]

A reasonable test for passwords is to run them through an IDNA checker, which checks whether a string is acceptable as a domain name component. This catches most weird stuff, such as mixed left-to-right and right-to-left symbols, zero-width markers, homoglyphs, and emoji.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/02... [2] http://unicode.org/emoji/charts-beta/full-emoji-list.html

Re: Emoji.length == 2

#25
post #4
post #2

Unicode is fucked. All these bullshit emojis remind me of the 1980s when ASCII was 7 bits but every computer manufacturer (Atari, Commodore, Apple, IBM, TI, etc...) made their own set of characters for the 128 values of a byte beyond ASCII. Of course Unicode is a global standard so your pile-of-poop emoji will still be a pile-of-poop on every device even if the amount of steam is different for some people. It's beyon…

Language is inherently complex, there's no way to solve this in any "cleaner" way than what we already came up with. Unfortunately the best way forward is to build up what we already have and cover all the warts with wrapper functions/libraries.

And where are the sex emoji? The dirtiest thing I've been able to text is a heart and a pair of handcuffs ;-)

Re: Emoji.length == 2

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Man, imagine if you could compose chinese characters out of radicals like this. I'm not sure if that would be a good thing or a bad thing.

The one that still surprises me is Hangul (Korean script). Hangul characters are made of 24 basic characters (jamo) which represent consonant and vowel sounds, which are composed into Hangul characters representing syllables. Unicode has a block for Hangul jamo, but they aren't used in typical text. Instead, Hangul are presented using a massive 11K-codepoint block of every possible precomposed syllable. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The original version of Unicode was primarily intended to unify all existing character sets as opposed to designing a character database from fundamental writing script principles. That's why most of the Latin accented characters (e.g., à) come in precomposed form.

It is worth noting that precomposed Hangul syllables decompose to the Jamo characters under NFD (and vice versa for NFC). However, most data is sent and used with NFC normalization.

Re: Emoji.length == 2

#28
post #24

Before emoji, fonts and colors were independent. Combining the two creates a mess. Try using emoji in an editor with syntax coloring. We got into this because some people thought that single-color emoji were racist.[1] So now there are five skin tone options. The no-option case is usually rendered as bright yellow, which comes from the old AOL client. They got it from the happy-face icon of the 1970s. Here's the curr…

It's interesting that in certain subcultures, including a large portion of the tech community, things that are non-racial are now considered racist. Not only do you have to be "racially aware", as they say, but you have to be racially aware in the right way. Being "colorblind" isn't enough anymore. Even the emoticons have to express race!

Perhaps predictably, this has backfired and will continue to backfire quite spectacularly; it turns out that when you force people to start thinking along racial lines, they might not end up with the exact same ideas about race that you have. I suspect this may be a large contributing factor behind the recent resurgence of ethno-nationalism (see the Alt Right et al.).

Re: Emoji.length == 2

#29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ideographic description characters do provide a way to describe how to map radicals into characters, but don't actually provide rendering in such a manner. There is active discussion on actually being able to build up complex grapheme clusters in such a manner, because it's necessary for Egyptian and Mayan text to be displayed properly. U+13430 and U+13431 have been accepted for Unicode 10.0 already for some Egyp…

Doesn't it already exist to an extent? That's pretty much how Korean is built isn't it?

Jamo, Emoji (including flag combinators), Arabic, and Indic scripts all combine according on effectively per-character basis. There's not really any existing character that says "display any Unicode grapheme A and grapheme B in the same visual cell with A above B." The proposed additions to Egyptian hieroglyphs would be the first addition of such a generic positioning control character to my knowledge, albeit perhaps limited just to characters in the Egyptian Unicode repertoire.

Research on what to do vis à vis Mayan characters (including perhaps reusing Egyptian control characters for layout) is still ongoing, as is better handling of Egyptian.

Re: Emoji.length == 2

#30

The thing that frustrates me the most about Unicode emoji is the astounding number of combining characters. For combining characters in written languages, you can do an NFC normalization and, with moderate success, get a 1 codepoint = 1 grapheme mapping, but "Emoji 2.0" introduced some ridiculous emoji compositions with the ZWJ character. To use the author's example: ‍woman - 1 codepoint black woman - 2 codepoints, w…

That's all well and good, but at the end of the day, some unknowing developer has to write this functionality into whatever input-related code for some program that doesn't use OS-level components, and it just creates a mess.
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