Were it not for Emoji, this blog would look very different (and would have been unnecessary)

re: Were it not for Emoji, this blog would look very different (and would have been unnecessary)

Michael S. Kaplan — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:17:53 GMT

Hey Random832 -- the Dingbats came in under another principle -- that of the encoding of legacy data in other character sets. This is new stuff and many people agreed with Hiroshi's take, both inside and outside of Japan....

re: Were it not for Emoji, this blog would look very different (and would have been unnecessary)

Michael S. Kaplan — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:16:03 GMT

Hey Cheong -- not really related in any way whatsoever. :-( Maybe you wanted the Suggestion Box?

re: Were it not for Emoji, this blog would look very different (and would have been unnecessary)

Random832 — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 11:29:54 GMT

"Having dingbats is one thing" - but isn't this precisely the same thing, though? The basic 'urge'* of Unicode to encode everything that anyone has ever used characters to represent - which is the only thing that can ever explain the whole of the dingbats block [esp. considering its strong bias towards right-pointing arrows that can only be explained in terms of the pre-existing Adobe Zapf Dingbats character set] is entirely sufficient to account for this.

re: Were it not for Emoji, this blog would look very different (and would have been unnecessary)

Cheong — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 01:07:33 GMT

Sorry to by out of topic. But I think you may have a clue on my question.

I found that my Vista PC have suspicious update today. The update is said to be related to "remove WPF from Windows Font that cause problem in Office 2010 installation". But aren't new font also be installed in Office 2003/2007? It should have caused problem earlier. Or is that Office 2010 will install some new font rendering engine so it hit some problem not experienced by earlier Office installations?

Anyway I'd also find the timing strange... It's not security related issue, and is a product support one. Isn't it Microsoft's policy to make it available through product support on request first, then deploy it through "Tuesday update"?

Thanks a lot.

re: Were it not for Emoji, this blog would look very different (and would have been unnecessary)

Hiroshi — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 22:08:03 GMT

I too watched this develop on the Unicode list.

While I am a daily user of emoji on my Japanese cellphone, I am rather opposed to this "encoding". This is wrong on many levels. Those reasons have been enumerated too many times to repeat.

It only made it through because of strong company support from Google and several large Japanese telecommunication companies. (Each Japanese cellphone company has been supporting basic mappings of each others private emoji set for several years now.)

If it was the same proposal without the large corporate support it would never have made it out of initial discussion.

re: Were it not for Emoji, this blog would look very different (and would have been unnecessary)

Michael S. Kaplan — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 19:25:26 GMT

I agree, and have trouble with the entire block. Mostly we all did, before I left, with only a few seeing merit in the proposal with lots of conceptual problems....

re: Were it not for Emoji, this blog would look very different (and would have been unnecessary)

ErikF — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 18:51:19 GMT

Can you ship an IME for this in the next version of Windows? It would work great with the qps-l33t locale that obviously should be there as well! :-) (U+1F601).

Seriously, some of these proposals are getting really strange. Having dingbats is one thing, but playing cards and cat faces? What's next, clipart? No wonder they needed to up Unicode's code point coverage to 32 bits!