A last missing link for interoperable representation

[Martin J. Dürst via Unicode]

On 2019/01/15 10:48, Mark E. Shoulson via Unicode wrote:
> On 1/14/19 4:21 PM, Asmus Freytag via Unicode wrote:

>> Short of that, I'm extremely leery of "leading" standardization; that 
>> is, encoding things that "might" be used.
>>
> It is certainly true that Unicode should not be (and wasn't, before 
> emoji)

Just to be precise, as already has been mentioned in this thread, the 
first batch of 'emoji' was in Unicode from the start (e.g. U+2603 
SNOWMAN, there since Unicode 1.1), I think from Zapf Dingbats. The 
second batch came from Japanese phones. So for the first two batches of 
emoji, Unicode did not do any "leading" standardization. It was only 
after that, for later batches, where that happened.

> in the business of encoding things that "could be used", but 
> rather, was for encoding things that *were* used.  This, naturally, 
> poses a chicken-and-egg problem which has been complained about by 
> several people in the past (including me).  Still, there are ways to 
> show that things that haven't been encoded are still being "used", as 
> people make shift to do what they can to use the script/notation, like 
> using PUA or characters that aren't QUITE right, but close...  And in 
> fairness, I'd have to say that the use of mathematical italics would 
> count in that regard.  It's hard to dispute that there is a demand for 
> it, just by looking at how people have been trying to do it!

"a demand" doesn't quantify the demand at all. My guess is that given 
the overall volume of Twitter or Facebook communication, the percentage 
of Math italics (ab)use is really, really low. It's impossible to say 
that there's no demand, but use cases like "look, I found these 
characters, aren't they cute" in some corners of some social services is 
not the same as "we urgently need this, otherwise we can't communicate 
in our language".

Regards,    Martin.