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

Post by weinzierl » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:00 AM UTC

miki123211 wrote: post #58

weinzierl wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 vis…

Thank you for the clarification!

Post by weinzierl » Sat, Aug 30, 2025, 9:07 AM UTC

maratc wrote: post #60

weinzierl wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I admit that it is not perfect. My argument is that Wikipedia at least tries to draw to line. There was a time even for Wikipedia, before the inclusionists vs deletionists conflict, when this was not the case. Unicode is still stuck in this phase and that is what I lament.

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

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