Unicode Emoji 5.0 characters now final

[William_J_G Overington]

Mark E. Shoulson wrote:

> Kind of have to agree with Doug here. Either support the mechanism or don't.  Saying "wellllllll, you CAN do this if you WANT to" always implies a "...but you probably shouldn't." Why even bother making it a possibility?

Mark's use of wellllllll made me smile and brightened my day, because it resonated with my use, in a different context, of wolllll near the end of the last page of Chapter 16 of my novel.

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~ngo/localizable_sentences_the_novel_chapter_016.pdf A PDF document of size 31.01 kilobytes.

Returning to what Doug and Mark wrote. When I read things like "not recommended" I imagine a situation where someone who is employed by a large information technology company being the person who actually sits down with the specification documents and makes a decision as to what to encode. That person is probably not one of the people who is in charge of running the company.

So the person may well have an annual review meeting with people several steps up the hierarchy of the company, people who can promote, grudgingly continue to employ, or sack the employee.

So I imagine the possibility of, at that meeting, the question of "Why did you implement all of those flags in our product?" being asked.

The employee then explains his or her thinking, a desire to help end users and to have compatibility with communication with devices made by other manufacturers and for it all to be colourful and fun.

The employee is then asked if he or she knew that implementation was not recommended. Did he or she know of that and went the other way thinking he or she knew better or had he or she not read that part of the documentation.

So maybe the employee takes such a possible scenario into account when deciding whether to implement the flags in the first place. Relying on "not recommended" is safer. If the people higher up get letters from consumers asking for implementation and they ask for it to be done, then good, that would be enjoyable, but why be the one who could be criticised.

I also imagine a scenario that instead of the "not recommended" that the advice might have been that it would be great and progressive if lots of flags were implemented in lots of products and it would be great if it could be done as soon as possible, by this summer if possible, ready for displaying at the conference in the autumn and to help that along here are some links to some free-to-use open source artwork that Unicode Inc. is making available in case you want to use it and here are some links to some free-to-use open source OpenType font glyph substitution code that Unicode Inc. is making available in case you want to use it.

Well, why not? :-)

William Overington

Wednesday 29 March 2017