Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

On 2/15/2018 11:54 PM, James Kass via Unicode wrote:

Pierpaolo Bernardi wrote:

But it's always a good time to argue against the addition of more
nonsense to what we already have got.

It's an open-ended set and precedent for encoding them exists.
Generally, input regarding the addition of characters to a repertoire
is solicited from the user community, of which I am not a member.

My personal feeling is that all of the time, effort, and money spent
by the various corporations in promoting the emoji into Unicode would
have been better directed towards something more worthwhile, such as
the unencoded scripts listed at:

     http://www.linguistics.berkeley.edu/sei/scripts-not-encoded.html

... but nobody asked me.

Curiously enough it is the emoji that keep a large number of users (and companies
serving them) engaged with Unicode who would otherwise be likely to come
to the conclusion that Unicode is "done" as far as their needs are concerned.

Few, if any, of the not-yet-encoded scripts are used by large living populations,
therefore they are not urgently missing / needed in daily life and are of interest
primarily to specialists.

Emoji are definitely up-ending that dynamic, which I would argue is a good thing.

A financially well endowed Consortium with strong membership is a prerequisite
to fulfilling the larger cultural mission of Unicode. Sure, for the populations
whose scripts are already encoded, there are separate issues that will keep
some interest alive, like solving problems related to algorithms and locales, but
also dealing with extensions of existing scripts and notational systems - although
few enough of those are truly urgent/widely used.

The University of Berkeley people would be the first to tell you how their funding
puncture is positively influenced by the current perceived relevancy of the Unicode

Consortium - much of it being due to those emoji.

A./