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Date/Time: Tue Dec 5 03:00:49 CST 2017
Name: Andrew West
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: Bricks Emoji
The Emoji 11.0 candidates includes a "bricks" emoji, with the note that the
"Image to be changed to be pile of bricks".
I do not understand what a "pile of bricks" is intended to represent (other
than a pile of bricks, which one rarely sees outside modern art
installations), or what the use case for "pile of bricks" is. A brick wall
emoji is far more useful than an amorphous pile of bricks, and I think it is
likely that implementers will agree and end up showing a brick wall anyway.
A brick wall emoji can be used to indicate a metaphorical blockage ("run
into a brick wall") as well as to indicate a physical wall ("Berlin wall",
"build the wall", "another brick in the wall"), but a pile of bricks means
nothing to most people.
Very few emoji have plural names, and most that do (e.g. GRAPES and CHERRIES
and PEANUTS) do so because they are small things that normally do not occur
as single items. Therefore, the ESC and UTC should carefully consider when
to use a plural name for emoji, and only do so when the singular form is not
appropriate or there is a special reason for using the plural. By default
emoji names should be singular, and as it is perfectly normal to represent a
single brick by itself, and talk of a "brick" in the singular, it is
appropriate to have a "brick" emoji depicting a single brick.
I therefore urge the UTC to either change the name of the "bricks" emoji to
BRICK and show a single brick, or change the name to BRICK WALL and keep the
current brick wall image. My personal preference is to encode both a BRICK
emoji and a BRICK WALL emoji as they are both useful in different contexts
(and one cannot represent the other). But please do not encode a BRICKS or
PILE OF BRICKS emoji as that is the worst possible compromise, and useful to
nobody.
Date/Time: Sun Dec 17 10:33:32 CST 2017
Name: Charlotte Buff
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: PRI #364: Feedback on Emoji Candidates
SUPERHERO and SUPERVILLAIN are currently not intended as emoji modifier bases, i.e. they are not meant to show visible skin. The stereotypical archetype of superheroes is Superman, i.e. a bloke in brightly-coloured tights wearing a cape and an emblem with their initial on their chest. Showing skin is almost inevitable when crafting the image of a generic superhero; an eye mask doesn’t hide the entire face. Even the sample images in the candidate list clearly show visible skin. Human-form emoji that can’t take on Fitzpatrick modifiers are presently only limited to emoji that depict several people at once (e.g. 🤝), fantasy creatures where realistic skin is not expected (e.g. 🧞), and activities that require the entire body to be covered (e.g. 🤺). With the possible exception of U+26F7 ⛷️ SKIER, Emoji aren’t excluded from the emoji modifier base category just because one possible glyphic appearance out of many equally valid ones doesn’t necessarily require skin. Besides, if there is any character that deserves to be shown with realistic human skin, it’s probably SUPERHERO. Representation matters. Cutting down the number of glyphs that need to be designed is not an excuse for arbitrary omissions. Of course, vendors can always decide to ignore the specifications and give SUPERHERO and SUPERVILLAIN skin anyway – they have done so for many other characters in the past – but this comes at the cost of incorrect text segmentation behaviour. ► Proposal: Add SUPERHERO and SUPERVILLAIN to Emoji_Modifier_Base=Yes. The current draft only recommends hair style sequences with U+1F468 👨 MAN and U+1F469 👩 WOMAN for general interchange. This is problematic for two reasons. First, it excludes U+1F9D1 🧑 ADULT. I thought after 15 months the UTC had finally come to terms with the fact that the neutral option is just as important as the male and female ones, if not more important. All major vendors except Samsung have included 🧒, 🧑, and 🧓 in their fonts already and they look more or less fine. There is nothing preventing vendors from designing these same emoji with red or curly or white hair. Second, it excludes children and elderly people. What are users supposed to think when their keyboards only allow middle-aged adults to have different hair styles? Wouldn’t people want to represent their entire families with the correct hair style rather than just the parent generation? Seeing how red hair is being added to empower red-haired people, wouldn’t ginger child emoji make perfect sense to empower ginger children who may be subject to bullying because of their hair colour? What about curly hair, which is an obvious stand-in for the afro? Wouldn’t that be culturally valuable for people of all ages? Hair style sequences could be selected on keyboards via long-pressing just like skin tone variants so extending the set wouldn’t cause too much clutter. ► Proposal: Add hair style ZWJ sequences with CHILD, BOY, GIRL, ADULT, OLDER
ADULT, OLDER MAN, and OLDER WOMAN to the list of RGI emoji. The CLDR short name of FLAT SHOE is still ‘woman’s flat shoe’. Clothes do not have gender. This is exactly the same problem that still affects U+1F9D5 🧕 PERSON WITH HEADSCARF, turning a neutral character gendered via its short name for no explained reason. ► Proposal: Change the CLDR short name of FLAT SHOE to just ‘flat shoe’. It is unclear what BRICKS is supposed to represent. The original proposal (L2/17-172) made a good case for a singular brick, and the previous draft candidate ‘brick wall’ can also be said to be useful in many contexts, but a pile of bricks just seems like an arbitrary compromise with none of the advantages. The majority of metaphorical meanings of bricks mentioned in the proposal refers to single bricks; in the few cases where the plural is desired users can just insert multiple instances of the character. A “bricked” phone for instance is not referenced by a pile of bricks unless one owns several phones that all stopped working at the same time. The important aspect of a brick wall meanwhile is not the brick, but the wall. Any other material would have the same connotations, but hardly anybody immediately thinks of a wall when seeing a few loose bricks lying around. ► Proposal: Change BRICKS to BRICK and possibly consider a separate BRICK WALL
character for a future release. The UTC wants to use U+267E ♾ PERMANENT PAPER SIGN to represent an infinity symbol. This is nonsense. ♾ does not mean ‘infinity’ on any level; it means ‘permanent paper’ and nothing else. The fact that the symbol’s glyph commonly includes the infinity sign is irrelevant. Unicode characters are defined by their semantics and not by their glyphic appearance; UTS #51 is not independent from the rest of the Unicode standard. Characters remain the same entity whether they are used in an emoji context or not; they do not suddenly change identity just because they are being displayed with a different font. Unicode was created to *prevent* shenanigans like this from happening; now to see the UTC trying to actively promote this practice is disheartening. We do not use ⛯ for an eye with thick eyelashes, or 🕀 for a Phillips screw head, or 🛆 for tortilla chips. PERMANENT PAPER SIGN has emoji display on Samsung devices because Samsung gives emoji display to all characters in the blocks ‘Miscellaneous Symbols’ and ‘Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs’, regardless of their actual usefulness as emoji. If people want an infinity emoji, either emojify the character that actually represents infinity or encode an entirely new character similar to what was done with ➕, ➖, ➗, and 💲. Preferably the latter option as this would make the continued use of ∞ as a purely mathematical symbol easier. It cannot stand that the semantics of long established characters will be distorted beyond recognition just so that people can use them as emoji, especially considering that many better possibilities are readily available. If it is too late to still add new characters to Unicode 11, then simply delay the infinity emoji until next time. There is no need to rush anything. Emoji are not vitally important and the mathematical infinity symbol is not going anywhere if people are so desperate to use it. ► Proposal: Either emojify U+221E ∞ INFINITY, or encode a HEAVY INFINITY character.
Date/Time: Mon Dec 18 17:11:47 CST 2017
Name: Mark (marklynch99)
Report Type: Error Report
Opt Subject: Darts Positioning
Good Evening Your positioning of the dartboard beside dice and slot machines suggest that you believe it is a game I’m not sure if you are aware of the below articles, both reputable British newspapers. Both state that darts is a sport and therefore I find your placement of darts in the games section inflammatory. Please adjust the placement of this sport so that it sits besides football, tennis and basketball https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/mar/25/sport.paulkelso http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/othersports/article-4733298/Darts-set-Olympics-Michael-van-Gerwen-backs-bid.html I await your reply Thanks Mark
Date/Time: Wed Jan 3 13:14:00 CST 2018
Name: Eduardo Marín Silva
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: Possible solution to the poop emoji connondrum
There is a need to express negative emotions using feces, but enconding a FROWING POO emoji is too overly specific. The comitee should consider encoding a FACELESS POO emoji, which is less specific not nmore. I don't know if a formal proposal is needed since the rationale would be identical than in L2/17-407.
Date/Time: Sun Jan 7 12:18:30 CST 2018
Name: Anne Fuehrer
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: Knitting emoji
I just want to make a request that there be an emoji for knitting. I see there is a ball of yarn in the beta version and I hope it stays in the list of new emojis
Date/Time: Mon Jan 8 23:39:26 CST 2018
Name: Huáng Jùnliàng
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: Mooncake Emoji
As documented on Emoji 11.0 candidates, the "Other Keywords" of mooncake emojiis yuèbĭng , which is intended to be the pinyin of 月饼. However, the correct pinyin of 月饼 is yuèbǐng , where ĭ<U+012D, LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH BREVE> should be replaced with ǐ<U+01D0, LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH CARON<. The breve mark should not be confused with caron mark. One can verify the correct form of pinyin tone marks from ISO 7098, the Chinese version is available at http://www.moe.edu.cn/s78/A19/yxs_left/moe_810/s230/201001/t20100115_75596.html .
Date/Time: Mon Jan 15 22:37:47 CST 2018
Name: Christoph Päper
Report Type: Public Review Issue
Opt Subject: PRI 364 Emoji 11.0 Beta
Hair: X+1F9B0..3
================
Firstly, we need to recognize that the four drafted hair-related emojis are
really from (at least) two different categories:
- Red hair is usually a native hair _color_.
- White hair is usually an acquired hair _color_.
- Curly hair is a hair _style_ that can have natural or artificial sources.
- Baldness is usually an acquired hair _style_, specifically a hair _length_.
This means they may afford different approaches.
Hair color
----------
I understand there are lots of requests for "redhead emoji" and "ginger
equality". I agree red, orange or ginger hair should be represented in
emojis, but it would be discriminatory to stop there.
Although there is a Person with Blond Hair emoji for legacy reasons (with a
characteristic long nose, it represented a stereotypical Westerner in
original Japanese sets), there is no emoji with explicitly brown or black
hair. Bending their definition and intent, most implementations treat the
Emoji Modifier Fitzpatrick Type-1 through 6 as affecting not only skin color
but also hair color: Type-3 is usually blond, Type-4 brown, the rest black.
(The shape and size of the eyes and the nose remain unchanged.) This leaves
many people unsatisfied because they have, for instance, blond hair and
Type-1/2 skin or Type-3 skin and brown hair. The number of such mismatches
is quite likely higher than the number of redheads.
Hair style
----------
Male and female variants of the same emoji are most visibly distinguished by
the length and, to a lesser degree, style of the hair. This feature is
literally unavailable for any bald emoji person.
Curly and Bald are but two out of a number of popular hair styles. In ASCII
emoticons, several characters have been used to represent hairstyles, though
not always with unambiguous meaning, e.g.
=:-) ~:-)
@:-) 8:-)
?:-) 2:-)
(:-) C:-)
These may represent mohawks, quiffs, baldness, partings etc. and other
styles may be desirable as well (but could not be represented in 7-bit line
art).
Practicability
--------------
Emojis do not work well if every nuance of a person's phenotype is supposed
to be visible in every combination they appear in. Unicode is not and shall
not become an avatar construction kit (although kaomoji are basically
portrait drawings employing glyphs). If someone wants to represent a certain
physical aspect of themself there should be an emoji for this, but it should
not combine with dozens or hundreds of other emojis. That means there should
be stand-alone emojis for hair colors, styles and lengths, and, frankly,
there should have been for skin colors as well, but that boat has sailed.
The restriction of the drafted characters to be combined with the Man and
Woman (perhaps Adult) emojis renders the whole point of emoji components for
human hair moot. Gender-neutral default person emojis with specific hair
color or style could easily be paired with U+2640/2 in ZWJ sequences, and
they would be Emoji Modifier Bases of course.
Proposal
--------
Follow the example set by Person with Blond Hair and Bearded Person.
- U+1F9B0 🦰 EMOJI COMPONENT RED HAIR >>> PERSON WITH RED HAIR
- U+1F9B3 🦳 EMOJI COMPONENT WHITE HAIR >>> PERSON WITH WHITE HAIR (or remove)
- U+1F9.. +++ PERSON WITH BROWN HAIR
- U+1F9.. +++ PERSON WITH BLACK HAIR
- U+1F9B1 🦱 EMOJI COMPONENT CURLY HAIR >>> PERSON WITH CURLY HAIR
- U+1F9B2 🦲 EMOJI COMPONENT BALD >>> BALD PERSON
- U+1F9.. +++ PERSON WITH LONG HAIR
- U+1F9.. +++ PERSON WITH MOHAWK
Do not add gender ZWJ sequences with U+2640/2 to U+1F9B2 unless at least two
vendors can come up with distinct graphics for Bald Woman and Bald Man at
usual text/emoji size.
All entries for sequences would need to be changed:
U+[1F468[+1F3Fy]+200D+]1F9Bx >>> U+1F9Bx[+1F3Fy][+200D+2642]
U+[1F469[+1F3Fy]+200D+]1F9Bx >>> U+1F9Bx[+1F3Fy][+200D+2640]
y = {B..F}, x = {0..3}
Hero and Villain
================
I whole-heartedly second the objections submitted by Charlotte Buff
regarding the value of the Emoji Modifier Base property for U+1F9B8/9.
Roll of Paper
=============
The Unicode name for U+1F9FB is overly specific because it should also be
used to represent kitchen paper or perhaps even uncut paper for printing
presses.
Proposal
--------
- U+1F9FB 🧻 ROLL OF TOILET PAPER >>> PAPER ROLL
Faces
=====
The exact number of hearts is irrelevant for X+1F970. There should be two or
more. Specifzing the shape of its eyes is also overly specific. Likewise,
the name for X+1F973 is too specific.
Proposal
--------
- U+1F970 🥰 SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES AND THREE HEARTS >>> SMILING FACE WITH HEARTS
- U+1F973 🥳 FACE WITH PARTY HORN AND PARTY HAT >>> SMILING FACE WITH PARTY HAT
Softball
========
Image of a softball and a baseball scaled to the same size are virtually
indistinguishable from each other. Only the main color (yellow vs. white)
may be of help if available. The baton used in these games is also used
outside of them as a club and would therefore have been a much better
candidate.
Proposal
--------
- U+1F94E 🥎 SOFTBALL >>> BASEBALL BAT (and new reference graphic)