Re: Emoji: emoticons vs. literacy

From: Christopher Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Sat Jan 03 2009 - 23:12:58 CST

  • Next message: Christopher Fynn: "Re: Emoji: emoticons vs. literacy"

    Asmus Freytag wrote

    > In that context, it's worth remembering that the two emoticons (sic)
    > that have been encoded in Unicode forever at WHITE/BLACK SMILING FACE
    > exist because of a single vendor's character set: IBM's code page 437
    > (and its descendants).

    CP 437 was a *pre-existing* standard - these emoji sets are a recent
    dodgy use of empty slots in Shift-JIS. Funny thing is the phone carriers
    are not even using UCS on their phones. However it seems Unicode is now
    being called on to solve their interoperability problems because they
    were stupid enough not to first agree amongst themselves on a common use
    of unencoded Shift-JIS characters. If the emoji are encoded, are these
    carriers going to start using the UCS on their phones?

    Why not simply map the otherwise unused Shift-JIS characters these
    cell-phone carriers are (ab)using to a set of UCS characters reserved
    for the purpose - without saying anything about the characters other
    than that they correspond to these Shift-JIS characters being used for
    emoji?

    - C



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