Re: Emoji: emoticons vs. literacy

From: Michael D'Errico (mike-list@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Jan 05 2009 - 21:56:03 CST

  • Next message: Leo Broukhis: "Re: Emoji: emoticons vs. literacy"

    > Suppose, using your mechanism, I send a message (in Japanese) from
    > Gmail (with language preferences set to Japanese) that contains a
    > "crab" picture that is missing on Japanese phones. What would (and
    > what should, in your opinion, and why?) the recipient see?

    It totally depends on the phone's user interface, which would be
    designed by the mobile phone manufacturer. But if this new crab
    emoji was written as "crab" using the emoji script, a fallback
    rendering would be possible to show "crab" possibly in a box or
    something to distinguish it. If the phone users know English,
    they can guess that it should be a picture of a crab.

    The current emoji have names like "e-1B7" which means nothing to
    anybody except a few engineers at the phone manufacturers, so I
    think "crab" is a big step up. As soon as the phone gets updated
    to the latest firmware, the next time such a message is sent, the
    actual emoji crab will appear.

    >>> Instead of
    >>> duplicating all the world alphabets in the "emoji" space, why not have
    >>> just two characters: EMOJI LEFT QUOTE and EMOJI RIGHT QUOTE (are these
    >>> names BiDi-compliant?)
    >> Because this creates "emoji mode" and modes are bad. (Sometimes I see
    >> people say that state is bad when they really mean to say that modes are
    >> bad.)
    >
    > No more than any existing quotes create a "quotation mode".

    Yes, more. The text between the quotes is rendered the same as if
    the quotes were not there. If you have an EMOJI_LEFT_QUOTE, then
    you are saying the text up until the EMOJI_RIGHT_QUOTE should be
    used to select an emoji glyph. That is a mode.

    Mike



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