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

[Asmus Freytag (c)]

On 8/27/2016 10:15 AM, Doug Ewell wrote:
> Ken Whistler wrote:
>
>> I would contend that encoding wildly popular and extensively used
>> little pictographs as characters makes a whole lot more sense in the
>> abstract than encoding box-drawing graphic pieces for completely
>> obsolete screen technology ever did.
>
> Though to be fair, the screen technology was a lot less "completely 
> obsolete" in 1991, when the box drawing characters were encoded 
> (Unicode 1.0), than it is today.

They came into the draft in the period from 1988 to 1990; during that 
period, dialogs using "text mode" displays were common for many 
applications, not just pure terminal emulation.

To demonstrate that it was "universal" Unicode had to show that it could 
be used to replace the entire range of actively used character 
encodings. Just as the same universality argument is what drove the 
initial acceptance of emoji. And will drive acceptance of a whole host 
of other symbols and characters, no matter how well they stack up 
against the purity of principle.

A./