RE: Comparison of emoji and emoticons

From: Ruszlan Gaszanov (ruszlan@ather.net)
Date: Tue Dec 30 2008 - 04:16:48 CST


On Monday, December 29, 2008 7:17 PM, John Hudson wrote:

>I think it is
>unlikely that a font will ever be the mechanism by which emoji are
>displayed on mobile devices, since this would require definition,
>standardisation and adoption of a new font format capable of supporting
>animated graphics as glyphs (The Photofont format supports colour
>bitmaps as glyphs, but not animated, so far as I am aware). Even if
>emoji continue to be transmitted as text -- which I doubt, because this
>limits the extensibility and customisability of the set available to
>users, whom I am convinced will want to create their own emoji --, they
>are not going to be displayed on devices using the same font technology
>as text. They are, and seem most likely remain, inline bitmap graphics,
>and even if they are index-linked to character codes that shouldn't
>mislead anyone into thinking that they must be addressable with font
>technology.

Then why on Earth are we discussing *encoding as text* something that is
unlikely to be ever transmitted or rendered as text in the first place?

Ruszlán



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jan 02 2009 - 15:33:07 CST