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It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

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Re: It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

#41

Post by weinzierl »

miki123211 wrote: post #29
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely wasn't a good idea. Emojis aren't text , they don't belong in Unicode at all. It would be one thing to encode, say, Egyptian hieroglyphics. That would be legitimate. But putting emojis into Unicode was against the purpose of the standard and a huge mistake.

Where do you draw the line? What about "fancy fonts" (foreign characters that look like latin letters)? Japanese / Chinese ideographs? Common pictograms like "stop sign?" Mathematical symbols? People made emoticons out of ~100 printable ASCII characters. With thousands of "real" Unicode symbols available, they would have gone wild anyway. As a person with accessibility needs, I'm honestly glad emojis exist. They at l…

"Where do you draw the line?"

Unicode's original self-declared mission was to encode all characters needed for written communication in the world.

Wikipedia once had a similar issue, where people used it to add all kinds of trivia and original research. There was a fight between the so called inclusionists and deletionists. The latter won and we now have strict guidelines that ensure everything in Wikipedia has to have strong relevant external validation.

In my opinion, the Unicode Consortium would have been well advised to follow Wikipedia's example. If they really only had added characters with significant organic usage we'd seen only a much smaller number of emojis added and in my opinion to nobody's disadvantage.

But this is easy for me to say. I'm curious how emojis help with your accessibility needs. Has it to do with the fact that they take up little screen space or is it something else?

Re: It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

#42

Post by tremon »

mock-possum wrote: post #28
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely wasn't a good idea. Emojis aren't text , they don't belong in Unicode at all. It would be one thing to encode, say, Egyptian hieroglyphics. That would be legitimate. But putting emojis into Unicode was against the purpose of the standard and a huge mistake.

Why would Egyptian hieroglyphics be legitimate, and emojis illegitimate?

I'll take a stab as an armchair linguist: Hieroglyphs still represent written language, in the sense that each glyph represents an abstract sound, and glyphs can be composed to form words. Emoji do not represent language, in the sense that they do not have a vocalization, and emoji do not combine to form words.

Take, for example, the various skin colors for faces and persons: if emoji were a real ideographic script, the written representation would be a logograph combined with a determinative, not a set of distinct glyphs. The irony of course is that is exactly how it is encoded within Unicode (an emoji codepoint with a skin color modifier). But doing it this way is exactly why emoji is an illegitimate script: it does not represent any non-digital form of writing, and the emoji modifiers do not have any representation of themselves, neither visual nor audible. Nor is the modifier composable in the way that a real language would be: it does not modify animal colors, for example.

Re: It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

#43

Post by mattigames »

maratc wrote: post #39
deepsun wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main pain for me is that most tools now sexualize the emojis: they force me to choose between :man-facepalm:, :woman-facepalm: and just :facepalm:. For. Every. Single. Emoji. I don't remember a case when I really wanted a sexualized version, I always want to express just an emotion. Just remove all the prefixed versions, and leave the pure one.

Since we now have :man-pregnant: emoji, in six skin colors no less, I fully expect all the animal emojis to also be gender-ized first, and pregnant-ized later.

That one is vastly more frequently used to mean "I'm so full after eating", just like the peach emoji is more used to mean butt than the fruit.

Re: It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

#44

Post by myfonj »

I see delightful unintended layer of irony in a fact that what the page really uses for the Emoji display are in fact image elements: JavaScript on that page replaces Unicode text with them. So the main heading content

    It’s Not Wrong that “[that formidable facepalm]”.length == 36
(sic syntactically wrong quotes) is in reality (for JS-capable and enabled clients) presented as

    It’s Not Wrong tha
    t (for HN) “”.length == 36
(arbitrary line breaks added for convenience). Here the "true" `.length` of the (scare)quoted content is: 144.

---

This comment is brought to you thanks: "View Selection Source" context menu entry in Firefox.

Re: It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

#45

Post by weinzierl »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #27
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It definitely wasn't a good idea. Emojis aren't text , they don't belong in Unicode at all. It would be one thing to encode, say, Egyptian hieroglyphics. That would be legitimate. But putting emojis into Unicode was against the purpose of the standard and a huge mistake.

The line is really fuzzy honestly. We have some universal pictograms that are known and reasonably well understood around the world and the way they are used is pretty much a writing system. An icon of a man or women on a bathroom door? Well you may write it in one of a million different styles (fonts) but the general idea is used around the world as a common writing system. I'd say that belongs in unicode. The real…

In my opinion the job of the Unicode Consortium would have been to encode what has significant and organic usage. Similarly to how Wikipedia only includes what has significant organic and externally validated coverage. If they'd stuck to that mission the line would have been a lot less fuzzy.

Re: It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

#48

Post by dragonwriter »

chrismorgan wrote: post #47

> “[facepalm emoji]”.length Are there any even mildly-popular languages that use, or allow, curly quotes for strings? I’d kinda like there to be at least one.

Like as delimiters? Ruby kind of does, in that:

  %{hello, world!}
is one way to write a string literal.

Re: It’s not wrong that (for HN) “[facepalm emoji]”.length == 36

#50

Post by maratc »

weinzierl wrote: post #45
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The line is really fuzzy honestly. We have some universal pictograms that are known and reasonably well understood around the world and the way they are used is pretty much a writing system. An icon of a man or women on a bathroom door? Well you may write it in one of a million different styles (fonts) but the general idea is used around the world as a common writing system. I'd say that belongs in unicode. The real…

In my opinion the job of the Unicode Consortium would have been to encode what has significant and organic usage. Similarly to how Wikipedia only includes what has significant organic and externally validated coverage. If they'd stuck to that mission the line would have been a lot less fuzzy.

The problem with that is, of course, that "significant" is subjective.

The modern Western society is very occupied with the questions of racial and gender identity, and it is generally accepted in that society that this topic is "significant". And since it's that society that the Unicode Consortium is working within, this explains how you get six different colors of "man-pregnant" emoji in the world where there possibly haven't been six different-colored pregnant men.

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