From: Leo Broukhis (leob@mailcom.com)
Date: Tue Jan 06 2009 - 13:44:40 CST
On Tue, Jan 6, 2009 at 10:23 AM, Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com> wrote:
> Emoticons (Western usage) started out as orthographic convention, what I
> called "punny use of punctuation". As long as users typed them in as
> punctuations and/or could visualize the punctuation sequence behind a
> symbol, the sequences still represent orthography. If users predominantly
> select them from pick lists and cannot visualize the sequence when they see
> a symbol, then functionally, this convention has become markup.
On the other hand, if users keep in mind the words they would have
used if emoticons/emoji were not available, then functionally, this
convention is a kind of syntactic highlighting. There is no semantic
difference between "I love NY", "I <3 NY", and "I [image of a heart,
possibly animated] NY".
If a user, for cuteness purposes, configures her MUA to replace all
occurrences of "love(s)" in incoming messages with a picture of a
heart, of emotion words - with the corresponding smileys, all
occurrences of references to weather ("sunny", "overcast", "clear
sky", "raining", etc.) - with the appropriate weather symbols, and all
mentions of Zodiac signs - with the Zodiac symbols, it is clearly
syntactic highlighting.
When the same is done in the outgoing messages, it is still syntactic
highlighting that is forced on the recipient.
When the replacement is done more flexibly, allowing the user to
decide which word or phrase to replace by allowing her to pick a
replacement manually *instead of typing it and indicating that it
should be replaced*, it's still syntactic highlighting.
And when a user thinks "oh, there is a collection of cute thingies in
my phone, let's see what I can add to my message that corresponds to
my mood" - she is creating a rich text message (these thingies could
have been JPGs or even short movie clips). There is no middle ground
in my opinion.
Therefore the question is, if Unicode is going to accommodate the
phenomenon of emoji at all, would it rather do it by introducing
"syntactic highlighting indicators" - note that there is no need for a
mode switch it the set of highlightable phrases forms a prefix code, -
or by allowing rich text, encoding the set of pictures du jour?
Leo
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