With the addition of some sequences of emojis you already know, and are confused to see together, because your system still doesn't know about the new combinations and just displays the individual parts in a sequence and it makes no sense.
> and just displays the individual parts in a sequence and it makes no sense.
IIRC some earlier version of UTC 51 explicitly stated that the implementations of a particular version of Unicode absolutely should not try to show any sequences, not mentioned in the emoji-sequences.txt and emoji-zwj-sequences.txt, as a single glyph and must treat them as distinct graphemes. It apparently has been removed in the recent years so there is apparently now absolutely no guarantee of what visuals and when exactly you can expect.
One big problem with this interpretation: expressivity is severely limited with computer text compared with handwriting where you can do what you want, and Unicode is about encoding what already exists, not creating anything new. You could say things like emoji skin tones are an exception to that rule, but modifiers are very limited in Unicode due to how it’s all implemented, and can’t develop in the way described near the end.
I think the color variations and joining characters should be allowed without limit or reason, and up to the font if it wants to support an amalgamesh of fifty five different “people” emojis in twenty colors.
They are thinking of allowing you to mix chain and saw emojis together to get chainsaw. This is going to be interesting to see how it will be implemented. Apple is doing something in this direction with Emoji Playground already.
Apple is sending an image today, in a future world, the Unicode combination would render whatever that device (local AI very likely) in their device.
This website is an anomaly. My style of communication is normally light hearted and rife with emojis setting the tone of my messages. Here I always need to adapt if I want to say something. "how can I choose my words to minimize risk of misunderstanding". This often means that I express myself like some sort humourless robot (imo). And that's also how I think about other commenters. Dry, academic/humourless, men (yes) obsessing over technical details in news in order to make money. But I get that this is intentional and on topic so as long as I'm not reading comments on some topic that naturally includes feelings (controversial/political figures/companies) it's fine and actually a breath of fresh air compared to other more expressive discussion forums.
Perhaps something that illustrates my feelings about emoji... I had to individually select two of the emoji in the article and do a search for them in order to work out what they were... (they turned out to be oyster and fireworks, and seven didn't render at all...
(Anther set of searches tells me that some of the ones that didn't render were 'anatomical heart', tamale, 'heart hands', 'face holding back tears' (another one I would have struggled to divine the meaning of)
Does anyone still use emoji? Except for ones on forum replies.
I sometimes get an emoji as a one-glyph reply to texts. That's about it.
They were far more popular a decade ago.
Marketing copy and job offers are full of them, and AI has made that much more frequent. I assume you include all kind of pictures punctuating sentences, such as "someone at a computer" when you mention working, etc., not just yellow faces.
Yes. When there is a post awaiting moderator review on one of my sites everyone can see the toilet paper emoji next to the board listing. I also have animated CSS that makes an emoji of a spy pop up behind threads in a couple themes. During Halloween I have an emoji bat emoji fly across the screen and a spider emoji drop down assuming the client does not have animations disabled on their desktop as I respect motion preferences. [1] (click set to use the spooky theme)
It may be silly to some these days and that's fine with me. I enjoy it and I have an odd sense of humor.
Can not speak for the original poster, but I tend to agree in that it greatly limits the speed of creativity due to the integration process, creates a very subjective bureaucratic process for inclusion, and that frankly emoji are not a script (yes yes, you can make an argument that they are akin to ideograms, but this analogy breaks down rather quickly). Thus, I think a different technological solution could have been warranted. The story I keep hearing is that it was necessary to get the Japanese telephone companies on board with Unicode rather than their own emoji hacks combined with local Japanese encodings, which I can sympathise with as a necessary (but unfortunate) evil. A word of caution though that I find text with heavy use of emoji largely unreadable as my eyes fixates on the emoji rather than following the text; thus I am likely biased (but possibly still correct).
All things aside though, Han unification [1] remains the worst part of Unicode to me as it makes it impossible to know whether the glyph I am seeing is the one intended by whoever wrote the text (Chinese names in e-mails for example is an utter mess for someone like me that has to have their system set up to mostly handle English and Japanese). The whole Han unification mess more or less necessitates markup and sometimes even the insertions of raster image glyphs for historical and regional texts which is just bloody daft. Yes, Unicode language markers do exist and can resolve this in part. But, they are invisible to the end user, can disappear while copying and pasting, and you have to rely on the original author even putting them there in the first place! Whenever someone struggles to see the issue, I usually propose that we unify the common subsets of the Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, and Mathematical glyphs which usually finally drives home the point.
> I usually propose that we unify the common subsets of the Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, and Mathematical glyphs which usually finally drives home the point.
That would be an awesome compact encoding scheme (and also help with the next 4million emojis)! And given the relatively higher importance of those CyrGrLat, it would force wider proper support that would resolve the issues you raised, which are all app-dependent
> But, they are invisible to the end user
Apps make them visible, some even do that for whitespace chars to highlight the difference
> can disappear while copying and pasting
broken clipboards can be fixed? They somehow manage to retain rich text formatting, surely they cna retain language markers?
> you have to rely on the original author even putting them there in the first place!
Nope, the author's input app can handle that just like the original author doesn't need invisible joiners to use composed emojis
They are not part of any existing writing scheme. I think they could be a different standard like ":+1:" and ":chainsaw:" but it makes no sense for them to be built into text rendering.
> They are not part of any existing writing scheme
They are today, and there is now orders of magnitude more writing that uses emoji than the entire corpus of many of the scripts covered by Unicode.
Language and writing have always been continuously evolving and that process didn’t magically stop when the Internet was invented. The first emoji preceded their inclusion in Unicode, humans used them in writing, therefore they belong in Unicode.
It’s for many, many things besides letters, and was designed to be so from the beginning. Pictograms of various types have always been in Unicode, and even in many predecessor codesets.
Unicode is for text symbols, some of which represent one word (e.g. &, U+2116) and some of which represent multiple words (e.g. U+FDFD). Other non-letter characters include numbers, punctuation, and so on.
Correction: Unicode emojis are, because they got added to Unicode.
>Language and writing have always been continuously evolving and that process didn’t magically stop when the Internet was invented.
Okay but why should Unicode be a part of it, and a judge on what to include? That sounds like linguistic prescriptivism, while the original role of Unicode was descriptive and the evolution was happening outside of it. Emojis before Unicode were perfectly fine as composites that weren't mandated by committee.
> Okay but why should Unicode be a part of it, and a judge on what to include?
How could it be otherwise? These debates have been a part of Unicode since the beginning, such as which Chinese characters to unify, which ancient scripts to include, which attested glyphs get their own code points etc.
That’s simply what it means to be a standard: Decisions need to be made, and not everyone will agree with all of them.
Ancient glyphs and Chinese characters existed before Unicode, the committee didn't conjure a new form of language out of thin air. The decisions with Chinese writing were necessary due to practicality (there are various composable encodings, including IDC in the Unicode itself, but they're not very practical for a general-purpose text processing encoding).
Unicode emojis did not exist before Unicode, the existing composite emojis/kaomojis/etc were already perfectly expressible in existing symbols, and were nothing like Unicode emojis. This was a huge distraction from their mission, and definitely not inevitable.
Today's emotes became customized, and it's impossible to express them in any encoding. They diverged too much from writing to be called writing, it's a volatile signaling system at best. You can literally make an AI generation or upload your picture, how do you even encode or standardize that? But because of their blunder Unicode got stuck with its role of a judge and censor of a new entirely synthetic language it created, which wasn't the original purpose of the consortium.
I think that Unicode should have been limited to only depicting existing writing systems. Anything else is imo out of scope for a text encoding format.
So what about ASCII control codes? They are non-printable characters that are part of Unicode, grandfathered in, yet aren’t part of any writing systems.
And home computers have had pictograms as part of their character set since the late 70s/early 80s. For example code page 437 (MS-DOS) had smilies, card suites, and other emoji. Likewise for the PETSCII (Commodore Pet) too.
And not just emoji’s, but full on drawing characters. In fact that was the only way to draw graphics on some early systems, such as Teletext, in the early 70s.
And then you have the question of what pictograms are part of writing systems. For example the media control symbols (play, pause, fast forward, etc). Or how about the fact that some emojis had been part of written text long before Unicode, in the form of “smilies”, eg :-)
I hope this illustrates that the problem was never an easy one to define boundaries for inclusion.
I feel like it would have been better to just allow embedding a small arbitrary bitmap or vector image in text. No one likes the current state where you send an emoji that looks one way on your system and then looks different on the receiving end. And it would have avoided all the conflict over which emojis get added and which don't.
That's a simple hack that fixes this issue, good job.
But now you have many more issues,
if you use a bitmap, it will look pixelated sometimes, some people love to zoom over text at incredible levels.
What about light/dark themes?
If you use vector graphics, then which kind of them? will you use quadratic beziers, allow cubics? And don't think that it is easy to render vector graphics efficiently, there are many issues, parsing, anti aliasing, performance, you are also adding a new security nightmare, a good attack vector with complex to handle, parse untrusted user input.
And boy, we didn't even talk about caching, when will you send those payloads?
when you type one emoji? Then what about the 2nd time? Surely not?
Then how do you know the receiver has not lost your first payload?
Should you batch send most payloads at the beginning? Will that introduce latency? Will you be hated by future generations?
Decoupling meaning, intent from representation, implementation is a good idea from text encoding schemes.
We should not lost it.
Fonts are a perfect example, most people are happy to use them.
They do not overly complaint that you can change the way text is looking.
The same meaning is sent to you, your platform text rendering stack is interpreting it and macos users are happy to have their consistent look, windows users are happy to have their ClearType legible rendering, ..well most are anyways.
Complex subjects rarely call for a simple hack.
Yet I agree, emoji rendering is an issue.
Some people even want to put in fonts rendering code (wasm?) because of how complex it is to handle.
The biggest issue with emoji is that it's not an actual glyph. Just think about the gun emoji. It was supposed to be a gun. It changes from actual gun to toy gun to space gun depending on the platform and year.
Imagine if you wrote the word "gun" and then 5 tech giants decided it was their job to change the "g" to a "b". It's ridiculous how lightly we take preserving messages when the whole industry is supposed to be about data.
They are also not specific enough to encode what they are meant to convey. People pick emojis for what they look, and if they look even slightly different the message changes, yet platforms are allowed to design them however they want and then change the design year after year. The letter "a" is still going to be the letter "a" no matter what. The same can't be said for "emoji covering their own mouth" which either looks shocked or mocking you depending on how it's designed.
> Emoji aren’t a language you can speak with your voice, and yet they give us a voice. They are the facial twitches and raised eyebrows that flat text stripped out of speech.
I love, love, love emojis and use them quite often in chats. They add emotion, whimsy, tone, and more. I can’t imagine text chats without emojis. I know that each emoji may mean different things to different people and also different things in different contexts. That makes it more appealing and inclusive (for and of people).
The biggest issues I have with emojis are:
* Too many emojis that I don’t know exist (search isn’t useful when you don’t really know or can express clearly what you’re looking for…Emojipedia helps sometimes).
* Too few emojis or no emojis for what I really want to convey.
* No way to flip any emoji vertically or horizontally or both. C’mon Unicode Consortium, you can do this!
The only times that I've wanted more emojis is when I'm creating a markdown file that I just want displayed as the rich html version, and I want some icons there, and emoji are the natural way because they're just unicode. Especially if it's a technical document that makes references to a UI, I feel like I want to use emojis as icons like you use FontAwesome, and i can get ~80% there, but I would benefit from more interface icons there. I've never needed extra emojis for texting though.
This analysis and comparison to ancient glyphs completely overlooks how emojis are tied in to technology manufacturers and therefore their profit interests. Emojis have been a major driver of the planned obsolescence business model. iOS (and even Android before version 12) requires a full operating system update if you want to get the newer emojis; eventually, that means having to buy a new Apple device. The constant addition of new emojis (and their essential role in social media) is one of the many pressure points that Apple uses to get their existing users to buy new devices.
We had a slack channel in our work where only emojis were allowed (all messages had to consist only of emojis). It kinda worked for a while, as a novelty. Though this also included our custom emojis.
> Fortunately, thousands of years of writing systems walked so emoji could run .
This fortune is imaginary, otherwise you would've skipped "the inventory phase" with emojis because you've supposedly learned to walk thousands of times in those thousans of years
It's really stupid we're leaving the definition of emoji to a consortium. This is like language by committee. Instead, we should have custom embeddable inline svg images that you can put in a personal library, and share with others.
The best example in support of this is the cotton swab that we didn't have a symbol for during covid, and everybody was using a golf club [facepalm emoji here]
- Small and large monospaced modifiers for all characters for columnar layouts in a font-agnostic way.
- Non-suspicious eyes emoji. You know it looks suspicious but people use it to say "I'm looking at it".
- Yogurt cup emoji
- More button emojis for like warning [!] and question mark [?]. We have red X and Checkmark but what about warnings and infos? The emoji for warning and question aren't available in button form.
It’s funny, you can go look at the point at which Apple started touting emoji additions to their different OS updates and it coincides perfectly with the decline and staleness of their software ecosystem more generally. Not even the TikTok generation cares about emoji as much as you’d think they do based on how much effort and attention goes into emoji and documenting emoji changes (like with this submission).
Emoji could disappear entirely tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.
Pretty good writeup! Missing some very fun details, though, which is normally fine but... well, the final paragraph is just hard to stomach. If that's not Claude I'll eat my hat.
Regardless, let's discuss the real issue here: Hacker News should support emojis, and it's goddamn ridiculous that it strips them! Like the hatred of markdown, this is a relic from an older tiem kept around for no good reason; either the three (quite well-meaning) mods are in some Eternal-Eternal-September neurosis, or the owner of this public forum is and they don't bother pushing back. Regardless: boo :( / DX<
EDIT: I now realize that this "pretty good writeup" is by one of the people in charge of Emojis, and thus just made some aggressive editorial decisions. Leaving this comment up to remind others to check the Substack's author before commenting!
Funny. This writing has such a strong voice and literary quality my reaction was to think "I'm more sure a human crafted this writing than of anything else I've ready today".
I agree. I'm deeply ill with detect-the-claudlish-itis and this mercifully did not set off my detectors.
Incidentally, I wondered if this was going to be "I asked AI to generate the next 4000 emoji", and was pleasantly surprised to find some joyous, snacky linguistics content.
> Take a sentence as volatile as "I'm going to kill you." Standalone, I’m calling 9-1-1. Tack on a loudly of ryongface like, “I'm going to kill you ” and now we’re both laughing. Add a wink and blood rushes to my face, you flirt. One tiny pictograph completely changes the legal classification of the message.
What in the hallucinogens are we talking about here? On the one hand, this is off the rails, in a way that feels AI, on the other hand, the only reference to "ryongface" out there seems to be this article. Even if I think that word could be corrected to … literally anything? … the rest isn't going to make much sense: "I'm going to kill you [winking emoji] — ha ha you flirt"¹ — seriously what?
> Take a sentence as volatile as "I'm going to kill you." Standalone, I’m calling 9-1-1.
Had to do that once, pre-emoji. I have a domain in .com which is also a domain in .co.uk. That's owned by one of the famous British "public" (i.e. private boarding) schools. I used to have a catchall email address for that domain, and once in a while I'd get student emails, which I'd return with a note about why the right TLD matters.
One day, I got a student-to-student email "I am going to kill you tonight."
No indication of humor.
This was shortly after the Columbine massacre. I couldn't ignore it.
I'm in California, and the message was from the UK, where it was late at night. I had some trouble getting the right phone number, but after a while I was on the phone with the very British headmistress of the school, who'd clearly been awakened for this.
Once I read her the message, she was thoroughly annoyed, but not at me.
She recognized the student's name.
It was made clear that someone was going to have a Very Bad Day. "He's only 12", she said.
If that message had come from a US school, there probably would have been a SWAT callout.
Depends on the emoji. Unicode covers a lot. Some of it is frivolous and distracting, not that there's anything wrong with that, imo. Some of it, like ♠ or ⬅ or 哥哥 or the degree symbol ° is important for meaning in a certain context, and not frivolous at all. most are stripped out. it is left as an exercise for the reader to work out which ones aren't.
> Regardless, let's discuss the real issue here: Hacker News should support emojis, and it's goddamn ridiculous that it strips them! Like the hatred of markdown, this is a relic from an older tiem kept around for no good reason; either the three (quite well-meaning) mods are in some Eternal-Eternal-September neurosis, or the owner of this public forum is and they don't bother pushing back. Regardless: boo :( / DX<
I agree. The lack of emojis on HN is an issue (for me).
ime those phone keyboard search features are in dire need for some semantic search feature. When my mind happens to search with a synonym that is not included in the underlying description of the emoji, I fail to find what I'm looking for.
Edit: hmmm it seems actually to be more of a problem with the symbols that are constructed by combining two emojis with a zerowidth char. Like the heart on fire one.
> Edit: hmmm it seems actually to be more of a problem with the symbols that are constructed by combining two emojis with a zerowidth char. Like the heart on fire one.
Both "heart" and "fire" match that emoji for me on multiple IMEs (GBoard, IBus).
One obvious missing modifier is the ability to animate them. There are a gazillion possibilities here, from the simple (slowly rotating or pulsing) to the complex (morphing one emoji into another). Some apps already do this when showing a reaction emoji for the first time by "popping" them into view, but I predict the next generation will allow the user to apply their own simple animations. The key will be to prevent them from being too annoying, like the dreaded <blink> tag of yore.
Please no. We've already forced text systems to handle mixed directions, require combining multiple code points to make a single symbol, & display color pictures, let's not require animation to display a string correctly.
We already have perfectly good systems for animation; don't stuff that into text rendering please.
If I was looking for new modifiers I'd look at the stuff people are already abusing unicode to do:
- Bold
- Italic
- Strikethrough
- Underline
- Subscript
- Superscript
- Fixed width
- Color
Arguably those should be HTML, but users obviously want them to be available in plain text, because they have the kind of semantic meaning that unicode was meant to handle.
All emojis are childish nonsense. The article shows what it calls emojis but I would call symbols. I don't care if you think you're having fun. If you use them you are acting like a child.
Every once in a while?! You see it everywhere. Especially immature social mediums; specifically reddit where such people thrive. Just the mere thought of wanting or needing 4000 emojis shows how outrageous it's become.
They do enhance conversations and can help express emotions more prominently than "classic" punctuation marks or tone tags (the "/s" for example). But I don't think that more than 30 or max 40 is in actual use - rest of the seems to be just forgotten.
Frankly, whenever I read that subcommitte decided to introduce new extremely specific ideograms to the set, I wonder what's the point of that because as above: these probably will be forgotten or even not discovered.
But at the same time I wouldn't call them childish nonsense. We have been using various emoticons sets or even text ones on the Internet long before emoji become popular. They're in fact still emoticons just with fancy name and some standardization, interoperability.
I'd insert my favorite "melting face" here but it's not possible.
I wonder what HN would turned into if emojis were allowed for one week. Probably wouldn't change, I'm just paranoid.
> What do the next 4000 emoji look like?
They probably look like this: □ □ □ □ □ □ …
With the addition of some sequences of emojis you already know, and are confused to see together, because your system still doesn't know about the new combinations and just displays the individual parts in a sequence and it makes no sense.
> and just displays the individual parts in a sequence and it makes no sense.
IIRC some earlier version of UTC 51 explicitly stated that the implementations of a particular version of Unicode absolutely should not try to show any sequences, not mentioned in the emoji-sequences.txt and emoji-zwj-sequences.txt, as a single glyph and must treat them as distinct graphemes. It apparently has been removed in the recent years so there is apparently now absolutely no guarantee of what visuals and when exactly you can expect.
> Contrary to popular belief “emo-ji” doesn’t mean “emo-tional”. It’s a Japanese word that literally translates into “picture character”
TIL
More specifically, the "e" part is "picture" and the "moji" part is "character."
e (絵) + moji (文字) = emoji (絵文字)
https://jisho.org/word/%E7%B5%B5 https://jisho.org/word/%E6%96%87%E5%AD%97
Yes but we used to call them emoticons which was a bit clunky to pronounce so it's probably a form of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phono-semantic_matching
Interesting, I always thought it was a quirky twist on the original emoticon.
One big problem with this interpretation: expressivity is severely limited with computer text compared with handwriting where you can do what you want, and Unicode is about encoding what already exists, not creating anything new. You could say things like emoji skin tones are an exception to that rule, but modifiers are very limited in Unicode due to how it’s all implemented, and can’t develop in the way described near the end.
I think the color variations and joining characters should be allowed without limit or reason, and up to the font if it wants to support an amalgamesh of fifty five different “people” emojis in twenty colors.
𓂺
ಠ_ಠ
Unicode adds new things all the time, rather than just, well... unifying character encodings, like the original point of the whole thing.
It's just a lot slower at invention than a scribe can be.
If anyone in the unicode consortium is reading this, we really, really need a chainsaw emoji.
They are thinking of allowing you to mix chain and saw emojis together to get chainsaw. This is going to be interesting to see how it will be implemented. Apple is doing something in this direction with Emoji Playground already.
Apple is sending an image today, in a future world, the Unicode combination would render whatever that device (local AI very likely) in their device.
Apple's autocorrect is already awful. What could go wrong with sticking more AI in between two people communicating with each other?
It's not really difficult to propose a new emoji[1][2]. The stories I've read have a sense of a fair process and sense of accomplishment[3].
1. If you don't mind documents and bureaucracy.
2. https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html
3. https://www.superlinguo.com/post/632983029772582912/new-draf...
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/create-your-own-emoji...
Clever and fun read. Helps me think of emojis' literary affordances.
Here on a website that deprives us commenters of emoji, I feel expressively constrained.
Or maybe I'm too lazy to remember how to express myself with Japanese emoticons.
Will we get a trainman for the emoji era?
<3
This website is an anomaly. My style of communication is normally light hearted and rife with emojis setting the tone of my messages. Here I always need to adapt if I want to say something. "how can I choose my words to minimize risk of misunderstanding". This often means that I express myself like some sort humourless robot (imo). And that's also how I think about other commenters. Dry, academic/humourless, men (yes) obsessing over technical details in news in order to make money. But I get that this is intentional and on topic so as long as I'm not reading comments on some topic that naturally includes feelings (controversial/political figures/companies) it's fine and actually a breath of fresh air compared to other more expressive discussion forums.
Perhaps something that illustrates my feelings about emoji... I had to individually select two of the emoji in the article and do a search for them in order to work out what they were... (they turned out to be oyster and fireworks, and seven didn't render at all...
(Anther set of searches tells me that some of the ones that didn't render were 'anatomical heart', tamale, 'heart hands', 'face holding back tears' (another one I would have struggled to divine the meaning of)
Does anyone still use emoji? Except for ones on forum replies. I sometimes get an emoji as a one-glyph reply to texts. That's about it. They were far more popular a decade ago.
Antiquated symbols used in historical texts is something I approve of in Unicode.
Marketing copy and job offers are full of them, and AI has made that much more frequent. I assume you include all kind of pictures punctuating sentences, such as "someone at a computer" when you mention working, etc., not just yellow faces.
Isn't this expected? It's always been custom emotes everywhere. Even before emojis, the "default emoticons" fell out of favor among avid users.
:)-8--<
Does anyone still use emoji?
Yes. When there is a post awaiting moderator review on one of my sites everyone can see the toilet paper emoji next to the board listing. I also have animated CSS that makes an emoji of a spy pop up behind threads in a couple themes. During Halloween I have an emoji bat emoji fly across the screen and a spider emoji drop down assuming the client does not have animations disabled on their desktop as I respect motion preferences. [1] (click set to use the spooky theme)
It may be silly to some these days and that's fine with me. I enjoy it and I have an odd sense of humor.
[1] - https://altchan.org/Theme?theme=spooky
I'm still a fan of emoticons. :) and >:( convey distinct feelings to their emoji equivalents in my opinion.
Personally, I think adding emojis to UNICODE was a mistake.
Why?
Can not speak for the original poster, but I tend to agree in that it greatly limits the speed of creativity due to the integration process, creates a very subjective bureaucratic process for inclusion, and that frankly emoji are not a script (yes yes, you can make an argument that they are akin to ideograms, but this analogy breaks down rather quickly). Thus, I think a different technological solution could have been warranted. The story I keep hearing is that it was necessary to get the Japanese telephone companies on board with Unicode rather than their own emoji hacks combined with local Japanese encodings, which I can sympathise with as a necessary (but unfortunate) evil. A word of caution though that I find text with heavy use of emoji largely unreadable as my eyes fixates on the emoji rather than following the text; thus I am likely biased (but possibly still correct).
All things aside though, Han unification [1] remains the worst part of Unicode to me as it makes it impossible to know whether the glyph I am seeing is the one intended by whoever wrote the text (Chinese names in e-mails for example is an utter mess for someone like me that has to have their system set up to mostly handle English and Japanese). The whole Han unification mess more or less necessitates markup and sometimes even the insertions of raster image glyphs for historical and regional texts which is just bloody daft. Yes, Unicode language markers do exist and can resolve this in part. But, they are invisible to the end user, can disappear while copying and pasting, and you have to rely on the original author even putting them there in the first place! Whenever someone struggles to see the issue, I usually propose that we unify the common subsets of the Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, and Mathematical glyphs which usually finally drives home the point.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
> I usually propose that we unify the common subsets of the Cyrillic, Greek, Latin, and Mathematical glyphs which usually finally drives home the point.
That would be an awesome compact encoding scheme (and also help with the next 4million emojis)! And given the relatively higher importance of those CyrGrLat, it would force wider proper support that would resolve the issues you raised, which are all app-dependent
> But, they are invisible to the end user
Apps make them visible, some even do that for whitespace chars to highlight the difference
> can disappear while copying and pasting
broken clipboards can be fixed? They somehow manage to retain rich text formatting, surely they cna retain language markers?
> you have to rely on the original author even putting them there in the first place!
Nope, the author's input app can handle that just like the original author doesn't need invisible joiners to use composed emojis
They are not part of any existing writing scheme. I think they could be a different standard like ":+1:" and ":chainsaw:" but it makes no sense for them to be built into text rendering.
> They are not part of any existing writing scheme
They are today, and there is now orders of magnitude more writing that uses emoji than the entire corpus of many of the scripts covered by Unicode.
Language and writing have always been continuously evolving and that process didn’t magically stop when the Internet was invented. The first emoji preceded their inclusion in Unicode, humans used them in writing, therefore they belong in Unicode.
Let me put it another way: Unicode is for letters, not for words.
It’s for many, many things besides letters, and was designed to be so from the beginning. Pictograms of various types have always been in Unicode, and even in many predecessor codesets.
Imnotsureyouunderstandwhattextwouldlooklikeifyoucouldonlyuseletters
Unicode is for text symbols, some of which represent one word (e.g. &, U+2116) and some of which represent multiple words (e.g. U+FDFD). Other non-letter characters include numbers, punctuation, and so on.
>They are today
Correction: Unicode emojis are, because they got added to Unicode.
>Language and writing have always been continuously evolving and that process didn’t magically stop when the Internet was invented.
Okay but why should Unicode be a part of it, and a judge on what to include? That sounds like linguistic prescriptivism, while the original role of Unicode was descriptive and the evolution was happening outside of it. Emojis before Unicode were perfectly fine as composites that weren't mandated by committee.
> Okay but why should Unicode be a part of it, and a judge on what to include?
How could it be otherwise? These debates have been a part of Unicode since the beginning, such as which Chinese characters to unify, which ancient scripts to include, which attested glyphs get their own code points etc.
That’s simply what it means to be a standard: Decisions need to be made, and not everyone will agree with all of them.
Ancient glyphs and Chinese characters existed before Unicode, the committee didn't conjure a new form of language out of thin air. The decisions with Chinese writing were necessary due to practicality (there are various composable encodings, including IDC in the Unicode itself, but they're not very practical for a general-purpose text processing encoding).
Unicode emojis did not exist before Unicode, the existing composite emojis/kaomojis/etc were already perfectly expressible in existing symbols, and were nothing like Unicode emojis. This was a huge distraction from their mission, and definitely not inevitable.
Today's emotes became customized, and it's impossible to express them in any encoding. They diverged too much from writing to be called writing, it's a volatile signaling system at best. You can literally make an AI generation or upload your picture, how do you even encode or standardize that? But because of their blunder Unicode got stuck with its role of a judge and censor of a new entirely synthetic language it created, which wasn't the original purpose of the consortium.
The original set of emoji were from JP mobile phones (pre-unicode-emoji) and should not be confused with kaomoji/emoticons
I think that Unicode should have been limited to only depicting existing writing systems. Anything else is imo out of scope for a text encoding format.
So what about ASCII control codes? They are non-printable characters that are part of Unicode, grandfathered in, yet aren’t part of any writing systems.
And home computers have had pictograms as part of their character set since the late 70s/early 80s. For example code page 437 (MS-DOS) had smilies, card suites, and other emoji. Likewise for the PETSCII (Commodore Pet) too.
And not just emoji’s, but full on drawing characters. In fact that was the only way to draw graphics on some early systems, such as Teletext, in the early 70s.
And then you have the question of what pictograms are part of writing systems. For example the media control symbols (play, pause, fast forward, etc). Or how about the fact that some emojis had been part of written text long before Unicode, in the form of “smilies”, eg :-)
I hope this illustrates that the problem was never an easy one to define boundaries for inclusion.
I feel like it would have been better to just allow embedding a small arbitrary bitmap or vector image in text. No one likes the current state where you send an emoji that looks one way on your system and then looks different on the receiving end. And it would have avoided all the conflict over which emojis get added and which don't.
The emoji plane represents the most censored, internationally accepted, committee-deliberated, and culturally sensitive image set in existence.
Emoji is as font. And Unicode doesn’t store fonts, it describes character encodings.
And it is up to everybody how graphical representation of such encoding looks like.
Unique, universal and uniform encoding -> Unicode, in 1988 coined by Joe Becker.
Which just highlights the issue. People largely don’t care how letters show up. Emojis changing form entirely changes the message.
That's a simple hack that fixes this issue, good job.
But now you have many more issues,
if you use a bitmap, it will look pixelated sometimes, some people love to zoom over text at incredible levels. What about light/dark themes?
If you use vector graphics, then which kind of them? will you use quadratic beziers, allow cubics? And don't think that it is easy to render vector graphics efficiently, there are many issues, parsing, anti aliasing, performance, you are also adding a new security nightmare, a good attack vector with complex to handle, parse untrusted user input.
And boy, we didn't even talk about caching, when will you send those payloads? when you type one emoji? Then what about the 2nd time? Surely not? Then how do you know the receiver has not lost your first payload? Should you batch send most payloads at the beginning? Will that introduce latency? Will you be hated by future generations?
Decoupling meaning, intent from representation, implementation is a good idea from text encoding schemes. We should not lost it. Fonts are a perfect example, most people are happy to use them. They do not overly complaint that you can change the way text is looking. The same meaning is sent to you, your platform text rendering stack is interpreting it and macos users are happy to have their consistent look, windows users are happy to have their ClearType legible rendering, ..well most are anyways.
Complex subjects rarely call for a simple hack. Yet I agree, emoji rendering is an issue. Some people even want to put in fonts rendering code (wasm?) because of how complex it is to handle.
So you want the only widely accepted international text encoding to require including a whole image encoding standard too?
Imho Unicode is the only accepted universal system how to sustainably maintain emoji… recent and all future ones.
Unicode has over 1.1 millions of coding points and it is allocated space ~16 pct only.
All alphabets’ characters are described, all emojis are in… and you still have 800,000 positions available for future.
There are more than 300,000-400,000 fonts and everybody with FontMaker can make another fork/copy/enhance “basic” sans or sans-serif fonts…
…and all of them use Unicode as base.
U+1F600 for smile. :)
Edit: TIL that empty square used in a font for non-existing representation of Unicode character is called tofu :) □
The biggest issue with emoji is that it's not an actual glyph. Just think about the gun emoji. It was supposed to be a gun. It changes from actual gun to toy gun to space gun depending on the platform and year.
Imagine if you wrote the word "gun" and then 5 tech giants decided it was their job to change the "g" to a "b". It's ridiculous how lightly we take preserving messages when the whole industry is supposed to be about data.
They are also not specific enough to encode what they are meant to convey. People pick emojis for what they look, and if they look even slightly different the message changes, yet platforms are allowed to design them however they want and then change the design year after year. The letter "a" is still going to be the letter "a" no matter what. The same can't be said for "emoji covering their own mouth" which either looks shocked or mocking you depending on how it's designed.
A while ago something like this popped up on HN https://emojikitchen.dev/
Not sure if it's the same but the concept was the same: the ability to combine two emojis together.
> Emoji aren’t a language you can speak with your voice, and yet they give us a voice. They are the facial twitches and raised eyebrows that flat text stripped out of speech.
I love, love, love emojis and use them quite often in chats. They add emotion, whimsy, tone, and more. I can’t imagine text chats without emojis. I know that each emoji may mean different things to different people and also different things in different contexts. That makes it more appealing and inclusive (for and of people).
The biggest issues I have with emojis are:
* Too many emojis that I don’t know exist (search isn’t useful when you don’t really know or can express clearly what you’re looking for…Emojipedia helps sometimes).
* Too few emojis or no emojis for what I really want to convey.
* No way to flip any emoji vertically or horizontally or both. C’mon Unicode Consortium, you can do this!
I have a set of about 5 emojis I regularly use (following a power law, the first is much more used than the others), and I completely ignore the rest
But I guess everyone has its own set of preferred emojis and it's all eifferent
The only times that I've wanted more emojis is when I'm creating a markdown file that I just want displayed as the rich html version, and I want some icons there, and emoji are the natural way because they're just unicode. Especially if it's a technical document that makes references to a UI, I feel like I want to use emojis as icons like you use FontAwesome, and i can get ~80% there, but I would benefit from more interface icons there. I've never needed extra emojis for texting though.
This analysis and comparison to ancient glyphs completely overlooks how emojis are tied in to technology manufacturers and therefore their profit interests. Emojis have been a major driver of the planned obsolescence business model. iOS (and even Android before version 12) requires a full operating system update if you want to get the newer emojis; eventually, that means having to buy a new Apple device. The constant addition of new emojis (and their essential role in social media) is one of the many pressure points that Apple uses to get their existing users to buy new devices.
The footnote is slightly incorrect, the hyphen in emoji is in the wrong place. It's "e" for "picture" and "moji" for "character".
Seahorse :seahorse:
I'm glad they finally closed that gap in the newest emoji set. I love the details on the tail!
This motivated https://github.com/pannous/uniscript
Demo: https://pannous.com/uniscript/
I wonder if 2 (or more) people with no common language ever successfully communicated with each other using emojis...
We had a slack channel in our work where only emojis were allowed (all messages had to consist only of emojis). It kinda worked for a while, as a novelty. Though this also included our custom emojis.
> Fortunately, thousands of years of writing systems walked so emoji could run .
This fortune is imaginary, otherwise you would've skipped "the inventory phase" with emojis because you've supposedly learned to walk thousands of times in those thousans of years
All those disembodied heads and not a single guillotine to explain how they got that way. I hope they fix that soon.
Hopefully more facial expressions and hands, and not more useless fruits/vegetables/foods.
So many useless symbols but no feed icon.
Still no diaper emoji. :(
It's really stupid we're leaving the definition of emoji to a consortium. This is like language by committee. Instead, we should have custom embeddable inline svg images that you can put in a personal library, and share with others.
The best example in support of this is the cotton swab that we didn't have a symbol for during covid, and everybody was using a golf club [facepalm emoji here]
I just use hanzi instead, personally.
You are amazing 火火火火
Everything I’ve ever heard, seen, or learned about emoji has been against my will.
Why not adjust your will?
- Small and large monospaced modifiers for all characters for columnar layouts in a font-agnostic way.
- Non-suspicious eyes emoji. You know it looks suspicious but people use it to say "I'm looking at it".
- Yogurt cup emoji
- More button emojis for like warning [!] and question mark [?]. We have red X and Checkmark but what about warnings and infos? The emoji for warning and question aren't available in button form.
I just want the rest of the superscript letters and the "external link" symbol
Also subscript but yes.
I have precisely 0 use for the emoji which already exist.
Genuinely.
It’s funny, you can go look at the point at which Apple started touting emoji additions to their different OS updates and it coincides perfectly with the decline and staleness of their software ecosystem more generally. Not even the TikTok generation cares about emoji as much as you’d think they do based on how much effort and attention goes into emoji and documenting emoji changes (like with this submission).
Emoji could disappear entirely tomorrow and nothing of value would be lost.
Pretty good writeup! Missing some very fun details, though, which is normally fine but... well, the final paragraph is just hard to stomach. If that's not Claude I'll eat my hat.
Regardless, let's discuss the real issue here: Hacker News should support emojis, and it's goddamn ridiculous that it strips them! Like the hatred of markdown, this is a relic from an older tiem kept around for no good reason; either the three (quite well-meaning) mods are in some Eternal-Eternal-September neurosis, or the owner of this public forum is and they don't bother pushing back. Regardless: boo :( / DX<
EDIT: I now realize that this "pretty good writeup" is by one of the people in charge of Emojis, and thus just made some aggressive editorial decisions. Leaving this comment up to remind others to check the Substack's author before commenting!
Funny. This writing has such a strong voice and literary quality my reaction was to think "I'm more sure a human crafted this writing than of anything else I've ready today".
I agree. I'm deeply ill with detect-the-claudlish-itis and this mercifully did not set off my detectors.
Incidentally, I wondered if this was going to be "I asked AI to generate the next 4000 emoji", and was pleasantly surprised to find some joyous, snacky linguistics content.
> Take a sentence as volatile as "I'm going to kill you." Standalone, I’m calling 9-1-1. Tack on a loudly of ryongface like, “I'm going to kill you ” and now we’re both laughing. Add a wink and blood rushes to my face, you flirt. One tiny pictograph completely changes the legal classification of the message.
What in the hallucinogens are we talking about here? On the one hand, this is off the rails, in a way that feels AI, on the other hand, the only reference to "ryongface" out there seems to be this article. Even if I think that word could be corrected to … literally anything? … the rest isn't going to make much sense: "I'm going to kill you [winking emoji] — ha ha you flirt"¹ — seriously what?
¹(Still quoting the article, here.)
> Take a sentence as volatile as "I'm going to kill you." Standalone, I’m calling 9-1-1.
Had to do that once, pre-emoji. I have a domain in .com which is also a domain in .co.uk. That's owned by one of the famous British "public" (i.e. private boarding) schools. I used to have a catchall email address for that domain, and once in a while I'd get student emails, which I'd return with a note about why the right TLD matters.
One day, I got a student-to-student email "I am going to kill you tonight." No indication of humor. This was shortly after the Columbine massacre. I couldn't ignore it.
I'm in California, and the message was from the UK, where it was late at night. I had some trouble getting the right phone number, but after a while I was on the phone with the very British headmistress of the school, who'd clearly been awakened for this. Once I read her the message, she was thoroughly annoyed, but not at me. She recognized the student's name. It was made clear that someone was going to have a Very Bad Day. "He's only 12", she said.
If that message had come from a US school, there probably would have been a SWAT callout.
Presumably you could’ve just forwarded the email to the intended recipient.
> Regardless, let's discuss the real issue here: Hacker News should support emoji
it should not, in my opinion
Depends on the emoji. Unicode covers a lot. Some of it is frivolous and distracting, not that there's anything wrong with that, imo. Some of it, like ♠ or ⬅ or 哥哥 or the degree symbol ° is important for meaning in a certain context, and not frivolous at all. most are stripped out. it is left as an exercise for the reader to work out which ones aren't.
♠ or ⬅ or ° are not emoji, right?
> Regardless, let's discuss the real issue here: Hacker News should support emojis, and it's goddamn ridiculous that it strips them! Like the hatred of markdown, this is a relic from an older tiem kept around for no good reason; either the three (quite well-meaning) mods are in some Eternal-Eternal-September neurosis, or the owner of this public forum is and they don't bother pushing back. Regardless: boo :( / DX<
I agree. The lack of emojis on HN is an issue (for me).
I mean, why can't you just add another 4000? Search in emoji list works well enough.
ime those phone keyboard search features are in dire need for some semantic search feature. When my mind happens to search with a synonym that is not included in the underlying description of the emoji, I fail to find what I'm looking for.
Edit: hmmm it seems actually to be more of a problem with the symbols that are constructed by combining two emojis with a zerowidth char. Like the heart on fire one.
> Edit: hmmm it seems actually to be more of a problem with the symbols that are constructed by combining two emojis with a zerowidth char. Like the heart on fire one.
Both "heart" and "fire" match that emoji for me on multiple IMEs (GBoard, IBus).
One obvious missing modifier is the ability to animate them. There are a gazillion possibilities here, from the simple (slowly rotating or pulsing) to the complex (morphing one emoji into another). Some apps already do this when showing a reaction emoji for the first time by "popping" them into view, but I predict the next generation will allow the user to apply their own simple animations. The key will be to prevent them from being too annoying, like the dreaded <blink> tag of yore.
Please no. We've already forced text systems to handle mixed directions, require combining multiple code points to make a single symbol, & display color pictures, let's not require animation to display a string correctly. We already have perfectly good systems for animation; don't stuff that into text rendering please.
If I was looking for new modifiers I'd look at the stuff people are already abusing unicode to do:
- Bold
- Italic
- Strikethrough
- Underline
- Subscript
- Superscript
- Fixed width
- Color
Arguably those should be HTML, but users obviously want them to be available in plain text, because they have the kind of semantic meaning that unicode was meant to handle.
All emojis are childish nonsense. The article shows what it calls emojis but I would call symbols. I don't care if you think you're having fun. If you use them you are acting like a child.
What's wrong with childish nonsense every once in a while?
Every once in a while?! You see it everywhere. Especially immature social mediums; specifically reddit where such people thrive. Just the mere thought of wanting or needing 4000 emojis shows how outrageous it's become.
Why are they childish? Because they did not exist when you were younger and people younger than you use them? They are used for expression.
Should we remove lol or imho from language as well?
Is replying to someone with ??? incorrect and childish and should instead be a complete sentence when you don't understand their message.
There are constantly people having jokes and sarcasm go over their head with just plain text on this very site.
Music also wasn't better when you were younger. There just came a point where you didn't want to try new things.
“Every adult was once a child but very few remember it”
;)
They do enhance conversations and can help express emotions more prominently than "classic" punctuation marks or tone tags (the "/s" for example). But I don't think that more than 30 or max 40 is in actual use - rest of the seems to be just forgotten.
Frankly, whenever I read that subcommitte decided to introduce new extremely specific ideograms to the set, I wonder what's the point of that because as above: these probably will be forgotten or even not discovered.
But at the same time I wouldn't call them childish nonsense. We have been using various emoticons sets or even text ones on the Internet long before emoji become popular. They're in fact still emoticons just with fancy name and some standardization, interoperability.
I'd insert my favorite "melting face" here but it's not possible.