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posted by martyb on Monday November 06 2017, @11:10AM   Printer-friendly
from the oh-shit dept.

A couple of the people deciding the fate of new emojis in the Unicode standards are upset over the latest pile of crap:

The argument over the emoji is between developers working with the Emoji Subcommittee of the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit corporation that develops, maintains and promotes software internationalization standards. The committee is currently considering implementing a number of new emojis next year, but the frowning poo emoji alone has caused some members to become rather upset.

According to documents obtained by Buzzfeed, objections have been made on the grounds that the proposed emoji is a poor choice. "Organic waste isn't cute ... It is bad enough that the [Emoji Subcommittee] came up with it, but it beggars belief that the [Unicode Technical Committee] actually approved it ... The idea that our 5 committees would sanction further cute graphic characters based on this should embarrass absolutely everyone who votes yes on such an excrescence," one person wrote. "Will we have a CRYING PILE OF POO next? PILE OF POO WITH TONGUE STICKING OUT? PILE OF POO WITH QUESTION MARKS FOR EYES? PILE OF POO WITH KARAOKE MIC?"

Another person wrote, "I'm concerned that this character will open the floodgates for an open-ended set of PILE OF POO emoji with emotions, such as CRYING PILE OF POO, PILE OF POO WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH, PILE OF POO SCREAMING IN FEAR, etc. Is there really any need to add a range of emotions to PILE OF POO? I personally think that changing PILE OF POO to a de facto SMILING PILE OF POO was wrong, but adding F|FROWNING PILE OF POO as a counterpart is even worse. If this is accepted then there will be no neutral, expressionless PILE OF POO, so at least a PILE OF POO WITH NO FACE would be required to be encoded to restore some balance."

I linked the Unicode 11 emoji candidates last time, but did not notice Frowning Pile Of Poo. This could be solved if they allowed any emoji to be used as a modifier for another emoji. Bar Of Soap + Frowning Pile Of Poo = Frowning Clean Pile of Poo or Frowning Poo-Covered Bar of Soap.

Also at Boing Boing.

Previously: Apple's New iPhone X will let You Control the Poo Emoji with Your Face
Google CEO Drops Everything to Fix Cheeseburger Emoji


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by TheRaven on Monday November 06 2017, @01:28PM (4 children)

    by TheRaven (270) on Monday November 06 2017, @01:28PM (#593015) Journal

    I can see the argument for the original emoji set: there is a legacy Japanese character set used for text messaging that included them and one goal for unicode is to support all existing character sets. They should then have been marked as legacy and not intended for use for anything other than backwards compatibility.

    There is absolutely no justification for new emoji and they completely miss the point of a character set. Unicode defines a set of codepoints, not a set of glyphs. It is intended that fonts be able to represent characters using different glyphs and still convey their original meanings. This is the case with things like letters, even in an ideographic language such as Chinese, because there are historical well-defined properties that the characters must have to be recognisable and rules for how you translate from the glyph to meaning.

    In contrast, Emoji are pictures. This is not the 1980s, we already have well-supported mechanisms for embedding images in text. IM protocols all support embedding images, and it's easy for users of the same IM program to have a pre-shared set of images that can be indexed by a table. There are also simple protocols that allow images to be named by a hash and fetched from the sender if and only if the receiver doesn't have a copy. Emoji solve a nonexistent problem in a bad way.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Monday November 06 2017, @01:54PM (3 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday November 06 2017, @01:54PM (#593024) Journal

    I think they're great and I hope we continue to see new emojis.

    The UI elements and flags alone are plenty useful for me.

    🇸🇦 🇸🇪

    ♲ ⚒ ⚓ ⚔ ☢ ☮ ☯ ☪ ☭ ⚡ 🌀 ❖ 💰 💡 🔃 💽 💾 📁 📂 📅 🔔 🔒 🔓 🔑 🔞 ⏩ ⏯ ⏸ 🔀

    Makes it even easier to make self-contained "web apps" (single HTML file with embedded scripts) without having to include a bunch of inline SVG.

    The emoji can also be defined by their code points. For example, it was very easy for my userscript/extension to add large amounts of emojis by defining a range, such as [128509,128565], and looping through them.

    The fight over new emojis is perennially amusing to me. Hence all the subs about it.

    There is probably no excuse for Unicode to not include neglected character sets when it is pumping out emoji every year.

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    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by shortscreen on Monday November 06 2017, @06:59PM

      by shortscreen (2252) on Monday November 06 2017, @06:59PM (#593247) Journal

      What UI elements? Do you mean those 17 squares in your post?

    • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday November 07 2017, @04:15AM (1 child)

      by darkfeline (1030) on Tuesday November 07 2017, @04:15AM (#593462) Homepage

      So instead of including inline SVG, you include a 4MB font because most fonts do not support emoji and even if the user's font supports emoji, you have no idea what their font looks like. That doesn't really solve the problem.

      Every web app I have to use now is completely unusable without allowing their large custom font resources because every button has a blank box character otherwise. Fuck you and modern web UI design and emoji in Unicode.

      Play and Pause render practically everywhere for almost no resource cost, ⏯ and ⏸ do not.

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