I suspect emojis as characters will soon be replaced with graphics. Consumers are annoyed or confused when emojis look slightly different on different platforms.
I think if you ship the font in your app to get consistent emoji renderings across platforms (no need to dump unicode for this) you might have appeased the people who want emojis to look the same on all platforms, but then you will enrage the people who want emojis on all of their apps to look the same.
So how much space will be wasted shipping a bunch of fonts that all include however many goddamned emojis there are?
You just gotta feel for the Unicode staff, setting out to improve communication across all of humanity. Turns out what we're REALLY interested in are funny emojis.
I suspect emojis as characters will soon be replaced with graphics. Consumers are annoyed or confused when emojis look slightly different on different platforms.
Art is very sensitive to copyright, so unlimited sharing of graphic artwork is still quite an unusual idea.
Once people stop needing and/or inventing new characters and scripts.
And emojis, don't forget about the all-important emojis.
Emoji: It's like Kanji, only without agreed upon semantic meaning or pronunciation. I pity historians of the future who have to try and decipher this garbage.
Small precision for those who don't know the context: the Eszett (which comes from the ligature of 'ss') existed for centuries already in German writing. 2017 is just the date of its official integration in the alphabet, so it's not a 'new' letter created from scratch. I say that because I remember learning it at school a few decades ago (even if at the time we were warned the subject was touchy), and I was surprised…
The Eszett (ß) has been already standardized for several decades (since 1986: with ISO 8859-1 aka latin-1). The newly added letter is the "capital letter Eszett", which did not exist until recently. One could argue that this new letter is not really needed, as Eszett does not appear in capitalized form except when a word is in all-caps, and was then simply written as "SS".
Standardisation was earlier than that :-) ISO-646 is the 7-bit predecessor to the 8-bit ISO-8859. It dates back to the late 1960s. Like 8859, 646 has several variants, such as ISO-646-DE which has ß where ~ is in ascii. (The trigraphs in C are partly to work around transcoding issues between ISO-646 and EBCDIC variants.)
> Unicode 13.0 adds 5,930 characters, for a total of 143,859 characters. These additions include 4 new scripts, for a total of 154 scripts, as well as 55 new emoji characters. So how far off is Unicode from being 'done'? At what point will they be able to stop adding characters and scripts?
> So how far off is Unicode from being 'done'? Do you think human written language is ‘done’ and will never evolve?
I think that most of the changes in Unicode 13 are not from the evolution of human written language. I don't know anyone who's ever written "blueberries" by drawing a picture of some blueberries in the middle of their text.