With the Iran example, it's an interesting world we live in where the design of an emoji by some of the largest companies in the world can support or detract recognition of new states. Especially with some of these tech companies bending the knee to the current US administration I could imagine a world where there are executive orders to say, remove the Greenland flag, or change the design of the Venezuela flag.
As someone that used the original emotes, all this graphics emojis just don't make any sense. There are just too many, and i have to lookup what they mean in isolation and try to dig what they mean in sequence... I dont have the context the user had when he constructed the sequence of emojis and i cant understand what they are trying to communicate, at this point it is easier to just say the words.
There are too many, and there are a ridiculous number of variants. Why do we need options for the skin colour of an emoji? How on earth does it change the meaning of a smiley or a face palm? Faces with different hair colours too! Clocks with hands at different times?
Why should skin colour be specified at all? Why not leave it as an implementation detail? Yellow is the popular default choice, but it could very well be green, blue, pink, or anything really.
Do you ever use them cross-generationally? I had a friend a dozen years my junior stop talking to me because I used a winking face when I wanted to make it clear I was kidding and he thought I was flirting with him. Never mind that we'd been friends for years and there had never, ever been a hint of interest between us. He insisted I should have known that's what it "always" means, never mind that I was using emoticons in AIM when he was in diapers.
The Unicode approach seems backwards in hindsight, but I wonder if it was the only practical path forward at the time. Getting Apple, Google, Samsung, and Microsoft to agree on exact pixel-level designs would've been a nightmare. Code points at least let everyone participate without vendor lock-in.
What's interesting is how the market solved it anyway—everyone just converged on Apple's designs because that's what users expected. Not through spec, but through sheer gravity.
The market hasn't solved it though, there's plenty of emoji where the difference between the Apple / Google / Samsung / Microsoft / Twemoji is divergent enough that it expresses a different sentiment.
I think this article just makes the case for what incredibly terrible idea emojis are in general.
Someone writes a text in 2016. Three years later, despite the text data remaining unchanged, the semantics are completely different because all vendors decided to change what the text should look like.
I'm not sure if this has ever happened in the history of text. The worst thing we had was encoding issues that were pretty obvious when it happened. Now you need to be aware of every change ever made to emojis and divine which platform the author was writing from to be able to tell what the message was actually supposed to be.
> Described as "emoji fragmentation" by some, it was clear that various emoji vendors' designs were highly inconsistent with one another, often leading to embarrassing miscommunications.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I still don't understand why anyone thought standardizing emojis as Unicode code points (without defining what exactly they should look like, i.e. leaving the glyphs almost entirely up to the font & UI/UX designers) was a good idea. I mean, it's not like facial expressions on their own are not already difficult enough to decipher, they had to add even more ambiguity by letting each app designer choose different glyphs? It's incredibly easy for the tone and meaning of a text message to change depending on what its emojis look like.
I fantasize about a world in which Unicode standardized a 16x16 and 32x32 bitmap format. Early emoji were designed for display at low resolutions like those. Your phone could send a character sequence that decodes to a PNG image or something and then all emoji would be accurately sent and displayed as intended. If you wanted efficient support for the original emoji baked into Japanese cell phones you could define specific code points to be semantically equivalent to the sequence encoding the exact legacy bitmap.
With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody
https://emojistime.com/museum
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/e5/36/0ae536826bb1cf643e6f05066...
There's no "neutral" rather its just "white without specifying it"
If emojis were really text this would be a clear violation of data integrity.
What's interesting is how the market solved it anyway—everyone just converged on Apple's designs because that's what users expected. Not through spec, but through sheer gravity.
Someone writes a text in 2016. Three years later, despite the text data remaining unchanged, the semantics are completely different because all vendors decided to change what the text should look like.
I'm not sure if this has ever happened in the history of text. The worst thing we had was encoding issues that were pretty obvious when it happened. Now you need to be aware of every change ever made to emojis and divine which platform the author was writing from to be able to tell what the message was actually supposed to be.
It's not that much of an issue and we largely converged.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I still don't understand why anyone thought standardizing emojis as Unicode code points (without defining what exactly they should look like, i.e. leaving the glyphs almost entirely up to the font & UI/UX designers) was a good idea. I mean, it's not like facial expressions on their own are not already difficult enough to decipher, they had to add even more ambiguity by letting each app designer choose different glyphs? It's incredibly easy for the tone and meaning of a text message to change depending on what its emojis look like.