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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

#51

Post by weinzierl »

maratc wrote: post #50
weinzierl wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possi…

Significant is only subjective in the heat of the moment and not much in retrospect. What I am arguing for is that the Unicode Consortium should only add characters with what Wikipedia would call notability.

I would like to stress that I am not arguing against the addition U+1FAC3 PREGNANT MAN or U+1FAC4 PREGNANT PERSON, there are good reasons to add these, but do we need mundane arbitrary everyday items line U+1FAA9 MIRROR BALL? I'd say no.

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

#52

Post by deepsun »

mattigames wrote: post #37
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.

In everyday speak "sexualize" means to make it sexy, so unless you are finding the emojis sexy you probably meant "genderize" or something alike.

Yep, I meant "genderize", thank you.

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

#53

Post by monkeyelite »

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…

Fancy fonts are not multi-colored graphics.

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

#54

Post by monkeyelite »

ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #34
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.

If you hate emojis blame the Japanese telecoms that created it. Unicode strives to digitally encoded all human communication and the Japanese were using pictograms for communication before Unicode.

Pictograms are not multi-colored images.

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

#55

Post by monkeyelite »

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?

Because they are one color. Like a font, their defining property is shape.

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

#56

Post by tremon »

weinzierl wrote: post #51
maratc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possi…

Significant is only subjective in the heat of the moment and not much in retrospect. What I am arguing for is that the Unicode Consortium should only add characters with what Wikipedia would call notability . I would like to stress that I am not arguing against the addition U+1FAC3 PREGNANT MAN or U+1FAC4 PREGNANT PERSON, there are good reasons to add these, but do we need mundane arbitrary everyday items line U+1FAA…

Actually, I don't think there's a good argument to add either U+1FAC3 PREGNANT MAN or U+1FAC4 PREGNANT PERSON: expressing gender can already be done with a modifier like how skin/hair color and professions are also expressed, and we already have U+1F930 PREGNANT WOMAN.

For example, this is the unicode sequence for bearded lady:

  U+1F9D4  person with beard
  U+200D   zero width joiner
  U+2640   female sign
So a pregnant man could simply be this expression:

  U+1F930  pregnant person (woman is implied by lack of modifier)
  U+200D   zero width joiner
  U+2642   male sign
But no, instead we must have this combinatorial explosion of compositions because Unicode can't decide if it wants to be a symbol library or an expression library. So now, we have duplicates like U+1F40F ram and U+1F411 ewe, U+1F404 cow and U+1F402 bull, U+1F9D2 child and U+1F466 boy and U+1F467 girl (but a baby boy must be expressed as U+1F476 U+200D U+2642), U+1F468 man and U+1F469 woman and U+1F9D1 person, and U+1F385 Santa Claus and U+1F936 Mrs Claus but also U+1F9D1 U+200D U+1F384 non-gendered Claus.

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

#57

Post by tremon »

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.

Perl has quote operators which come close, but they start with a letter followed by your choice of delimiter:

  my $string1 = q{for example};
  my $string2 = q;
  my $string3 = q/or any other symbol/;

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

#58

Post by miki123211 »

weinzierl wrote: post #41
miki123211 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

Emojis have names. When somebody sends a "stop sign", "smiling face" or "jack-o lantern" emoji, I know exactly what they mean. Screen readers can (and do) pronounce these.

When somebody sends a bunch of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs mixed in with some mathematical symbols, with a little Katakana on top, I have no idea what they mean. The message may encode some visual meaning due to how the characters look and the visual patterns they form when placed in combination, but its semantic meaning isn't clear, so a non-visual technology cannot interpret and pronounce it properly.

This is a very common issue with "fancy font generators", which were common in certain Twitter communities once upon a time.

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

#59

Post by dang »

Recent and related:

It’s not wrong that "\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981525 - Aug 2025 (274 comments)

(btw the title edit on that one was for fun, and came about this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981808)

Also related:

It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼‍♂️".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 - June 2023 (303 comments)

String length functions for single emoji characters evaluate to greater than 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 - March 2021 (127 comments)

String Lengths in Unicode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 - Sept 2019 (140 comments)

(as you can see, we've taken quite a few different whacks at that piñata of a title over the years)

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

#60

Post by maratc »

weinzierl wrote: post #51
maratc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 possi…

Significant is only subjective in the heat of the moment and not much in retrospect. What I am arguing for is that the Unicode Consortium should only add characters with what Wikipedia would call notability . I would like to stress that I am not arguing against the addition U+1FAC3 PREGNANT MAN or U+1FAC4 PREGNANT PERSON, there are good reasons to add these, but do we need mundane arbitrary everyday items line U+1FAA…

The concept of notability is similarly subjective, the issues like the mentioned race/gender identity (or e.g. the Russian-Ukrainian war recently) are perceived as very notable on English Wikipedia.
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