Why so much emoji nonsense?

Martin J. Dürst via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Wed Feb 14 20:20:49 CST 2018


On 2018/02/15 10:49, James Kass via Unicode wrote:

> Yes, except that Unicode "supported" all manner of things being
> interchanged by setting aside a range of code points for private use.
> Which enabled certain cell phone companies to save some bandwidth by
> assigning various popular in-line graphics to PUA code points.

The original Japanese cell phone carrier emoji where defined in the 
unassigned area of Shift_JIS, not Unicode. Shift_JIS doesn't have an 
official private area, but using the empty area by companies had already 
happened for Kanji (by IBM, NEC, Microsoft). Also, there was some 
transcoding software initially that mapped some of the emoji to areas in 
Unicode besides the PUA, based on very simplistic conversion.

> The
> "problem" was that these phone companies failed to get together on
> those PUA code point assignments, so they could not exchange their
> icons in a standard fashion between competing phone systems.  [Image
> of the world's smallest violin playing.]

Emoji were originally a competitive device. As an example, NTT Docomo 
allowed the ticket service PIA to have an emoji for their service, most 
probably in order to entice them to sign up to participate in the 
original I-mode (first case of Web on mobile phones) service. Of course, 
that specific emoji (or was it several) wasn't encoded in Unicode 
because of trademark issues.

Regards,    Martin.


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