Comment in a leading German newspaper regarding the way UTC and Apple handle Emoji as an attack on Free Speech

[Markus Scherer]

On Fri, Aug 26, 2016 at 10:26 AM, Ken Whistler <kenwhistler at att.net> wrote:

> On 8/26/2016 10:01 AM, John O'Conner wrote:
>
>> What I find more interesting is how emoji (a small digital image or icon)
>> was ever interpreted as encodable text for the Unicode Standard. If our
>> German newspaper friends have made a mistake in interpreting emoji as
>> speech, I think the Unicode consortium has made an even bigger mistake.
>>
>>
> That particular horse left the barn over a decade ago, when Japanese
> telcom companies started extending Shift-JIS with emoji on various phones,
> and then connected those phones to the internet and started exchanging
> email with Unicode-based systems. The emoji were *already* *encoded* text
> by that point -- not merely some prospective, uncertain set of entities
> which *might* be *encodable*.
>

Several people over time have also pointed out that "small images or icons"
already got a foot in the door with Dingbats in Unicode 1.0.

markus
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