Re: Why so much emoji nonsense?

On Fri, 16 Feb 2018 10:57:57 +0000
Phake Nick via Unicode <unicode_at_unicode.org> wrote:

> 2. Actually, the problem is not just limited to emoji. Many
> Ideographic characters (Chinese, Japanese, etc) are adding to the
> unicode each years, while at the current rate there are still many
> rooms in Unicode standard to contain them, it's still more open-ended
> than would be desired for a multilingual encoding system, and the it
> also make it hard to expect newly encoded ideographic characters to
> just "work" on different system with sufficient font support.

Isn't Unicode designed to stifle innovation? -:)

Actually, there are two mechanisms that could be made to support
innovations. For characters with limited dissemination, one can revert
to a font-based mechanism that defines properties for graphical PUA
characters. The problem is that that won't work at all well in plain
text like this email. I thought a specialised version of the scheme was
already working for Japanese names - PUAs started as a temporary
extension measure for CJK encodings.

A more portable solution for ideographs is to render an Ideographic
Description Sequences (IDS) as approximations to the characters they
describe. The Unicode Standard carefully does not prohibit so doing,
and a similar scheme is being developed for blocks of Egyptian
Hieroglyphs, and has been proposed for Mayan as well. There may be
merit in making the rendering of an IDs ugly, so as to encourage its
replacement by the encoding of the character. I gather that making the
use of IDSes consistent with searching is considered daunting.

Richard.

 
Received on Fri Feb 16 2018 - 10:01:11 CST