From: Jukka K. Korpela (jkorpela@cs.tut.fi)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2011 - 02:57:29 CST
William_J_G Overington wrote:
> What far-reaching implications do you consider might arise from the
> emoji encoding decision please?
Please don’t make me started. ☺ The door has already been opened for
encoding anything graphic as characters.
> Could you possibly enlarge on your statement "-dingbats are a
> different dimension." please?
A dingbat character encodes a particular graphic shape as such, though
allowing some design variation as long as the shape remains “the same.”
Fonts that contain dingbats generally follow this idea.
In contrast, emoji characters effectively encode graphic ideas—rather
specific ideas, like “birthday cake”, which might be rendered as anything
commonly recognizable as a birthday cake (though the use as a character
implies that the design must be rather simple, icon-like). For example, the
number of candles might vary.
Check out the Unicode FAQ on the difference:
http://www.unicode.org/faq/emoji_dingbats.html
(I’m not implying that my description corresponds to that official
explanation.)
-- Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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