Encoding italic (was: A last missing link)

James Kass via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Thu Jan 24 09:42:37 CST 2019


Andrew West wrote,

 > Why should we not expect the conventional Unicode character encoding
 > mode to apply to emoji?

Remember when William Overington used to post about encoding colours, 
sometimes accompanied by novel suggestions about how they could be 
encoded or referenced in plain-text?

Here's a very polite reply from John Hudson from 2000,
http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML024/1042.html
...and, over time, many of the replies to William Overington's colorful 
suggestions were less than polite.  But it was clear that colors were 
out-of-scope for a computer plain-text encoding standard.

So I don't expect the conventional model to apply to emoji because it 
didn't; if it had, they'd not have been encoded.  Since they're in 
there, the conventional model does not apply.  Of course, the 
conventions have changed along with the concept of what's acceptable in 
plain-text.

Since emoji are an open-ended evolving phenomenon, there probably has to 
be a provision for expansion.  Any idea about them having been a finite 
set overlooked the probability of open-endedness and the impracticality 
of having only the original subset covered in plain-text while additions 
would be banished to higher level protocols.

Thank you for the information about current emoji additions being 
unrelated to vendors.  I have to confess that I haven't kept up-to-date 
on the emoji.

Maybe I should have said that emoji are fan-driven.



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