From: William_J_G Overington (wjgo_10009@btinternet.com)
Date: Thu Jan 27 2011 - 04:28:46 CST
On Thursday 27 January 2011, Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi> wrote:
> 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.
Well, not necessarily.
Even if the door has been opened, I do not understand why the opening of the door for encoding anything graphic as characters would be considered to be wrong. There are many unused planes of character codepoints. I feel that it is better to use some of them if some people want to use them. Indeed I have various ideas for encoding things as characters that are not just graphic characters, such as my idea for encoding localizable sentences. I accept that for such a use that they could be all placed in somewhere like plane 7 with a rule that they can just be displayed as graphic glyphs if there is no facility, or choice, to localize them as sentences in a chosen language at the displaying computer or mobile telephone that is being used. There seems to me no reason not to use some of the empty encoding space that is there for producing futuristic developments.
For example, sentences such as the following.
U+7XXXX Where is a pharmacy please?
U+7XXXX Where can I buy a meal without any gluten in it please?
I feel that if the Unicode Technical Committee were to hold a Public Review on whether to encode some localizable sentences in plane 7 then there is a good chance that great progress could be made.
Thank you for explaining about dingbats.
> 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.)
The webpage, timestamped as "Last updated: - 21 December 2010 00:04:41" includes the following.
quote
Q: What about Wingdings and Webdings? Are they encoded, and if not, why?
A: Many of the symbols in Microsoft's Webdings and Wingdings series fonts have already been encoded in Unicode. An investigation is underway to determine which of the remaining unencoded symbols are reasonable candidates for encoding and to propose these for encoding; stay tuned. [PE]
end quote
William Overington
27 January 2011
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