From: James Kass (thunder-bird@earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Dec 28 2008 - 18:01:39 CST
Doug Ewell wrote,
>I am frustrated -- yes, that's a human emotion; there's probably an
>emoji for it -- that nobody has chosen to address my question from
>several days ago, asking whether we could find out if these 600+ symbols
>are actually used by these millions of people who supposedly find them
>"of great use," or if they are simply *available* to millions of people.
>Instead, it is simply taken on faith that all of them are necessary.
It shouldn't surprise that requests for additional pertinant
information go unanswered. After all, the proponents of
emoji encoding are comfortable with the notion that this
is a "done deal", so why "rock the boat" with potentially
detrimental facts?
We're told that there are 'millions of users' out there. It
may be true that there are millions of subscribers to these
various Japanese telephone companies. It also may be true
that many of these subscribers only use their phones to exchange
actual speech. It may also be true that some of these subscribers
use their "cells" to exchange text messages. It might also be
accurate to say that a subset of *those* users are using the
Japanese emoticons offered by the vendors. It is, however,
unlikely in the extreme that all the millions of those subscribers
are using all the hundreds of those emoticons on a regular basis.
I suspect that some users may employ a core subset of those
emoticons in a consistent fashion. I further suspect that most
of those core emoticons already exist as valid characters in Unicode.
These Japanese vendors have already rejected such valid characters
in favor of private use characters which are used to reference
their cute little graphics for exchange purposes. So I suspect
that they may well continue to reject valid Unicode characters in
order to ensure that their cute little graphics can go on being
exchanged.
Best regards,
James Kass
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