Comment by codethief

Comment by codethief 2 days ago

> Described as "emoji fragmentation" by some, it was clear that various emoji vendors' designs were highly inconsistent with one another, often leading to embarrassing miscommunications.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I still don't understand why anyone thought standardizing emojis as Unicode code points (without defining what exactly they should look like, i.e. leaving the glyphs almost entirely up to the font & UI/UX designers) was a good idea. I mean, it's not like facial expressions on their own are not already difficult enough to decipher, they had to add even more ambiguity by letting each app designer choose different glyphs? It's incredibly easy for the tone and meaning of a text message to change depending on what its emojis look like.

adzm 2 days ago

I'd say it has worked pretty well with a few notable exceptions.

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idle_zealot 2 days ago

I fantasize about a world in which Unicode standardized a 16x16 and 32x32 bitmap format. Early emoji were designed for display at low resolutions like those. Your phone could send a character sequence that decodes to a PNG image or something and then all emoji would be accurately sent and displayed as intended. If you wanted efficient support for the original emoji baked into Japanese cell phones you could define specific code points to be semantically equivalent to the sequence encoding the exact legacy bitmap.

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AlienRobot 2 days ago

    With a sufficient number of users of an API,
    it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
    all observable behaviors of your system
    will be depended on by somebody

https://www.hyrumslaw.com/

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RandomTeaParty 2 days ago

Emoji look isn't standardized for the same reason letters look isn't - because it is font detail

Imagine outlawing comic sans because "letters must be serious" or smth

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codethief 3 hours ago

But the font design typically doesn't influence or change the meaning of the text. With emojis it does.
…and that's precisely why I complained that emojis have been standardized as Unicode code points, with their design being left to font designers. You just re-iterated that this is a consequence of using (abusing) the charset, which I had already acknowledged.

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