The management of the encoding process of emoji

I have been reading the following document.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17192-response-cmts.pdf

Comments in response to L2-17/147
To: UTC
From: Peter Edberg & Mark Davis, for the Emoji Subcommittee
Date: 2017 June 15

For convenience, here is a link to the L2-17/147 document.

http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17147-emoji-subcommittee.pdf

In relation to the 17192-response-cmts.pdf document I write about two particular matters.

In section 3.b of the document, there is the following.

> ...; a great many proposals are received, many in an informal way, and many are ill-formed (a significant number come from children).

How does Unicode Inc. respond to children please?

As emoji are picture characters, just pieces of art, rather than something with safety issues such as, say, designing a new railway locomotive, is encouragement given to the children?

In section 2.a.iv is the following.

> Two key issues are whether the characters are likely to be popular and whether they would be supported by major vendors.

I am rather concerned at what I am calling majorvendorism. I am concerned that progress in encoding may become subject to majorvendorization whereby only new ideas acceptable to at least one of a small number of major vendors can make progress.

On many modern personal computers, fonts used by an end user do not necessarily need to have been produced by the producer of the operating system. Mostly, application programs can use any font that complies to the font standard.

Fonts can be produced by many people, including an individual sat at home using a home computer using budget fontmaking software. That includes colour fonts.

Fonts can be distributed electronically over the Internet, either for a fee or at no charge as desired by the publisher of the font. So a font produced other than by a major vendor could become widely used even though it is not bundled with an operating system.

So there seems to me to be no fair reason for Unicode Inc. to include majorvendorism in its decision-making process.

If a major vendor chooses, for commercial reasons, not to support some emoji then that is a matter for that major vendor and should not be a factor in the Unicode encoding process.

I opine that progress should not be majorvendorized as that may impede the implementation of new ideas from individuals and small enterprises and new enterprises that are not connected to a major vendor.

William Overington

Saturday 17 June 2017
Received on Sat Jun 17 2017 - 09:59:12 CDT