New Public Review on QID emoji

[wjgo_10009@btinternet.com via Unicode]

Asmus Freytag wrote as follows.

> Just because a select group of people engages in communication about 
> the arcane details of a proposed specification it doesn't mean that 
> the outcome will benefit some entirely different and larger group 
> communicate better.

This is logically true. However the same could have been said about 
people discussing the details of the then proposed Unicode specification 
over a quarter of a century ago, wanting to use 16 bits for each 
character used in ordinary English instead of just 8 bits. Yet Unicode 
has benefitted many many people around the world who may not know much 
about the underlying theory and technology.

I looked up the word 'arcane' and I opine that the details of the QID 
emoji proposal are not arcane. They are clear and available free to 
view, without registration, on the internet.

https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/arcane

https://www.unicode.org/review/pri408/

> There's too much of the "might possibly" about this; …

It provides and opportunity for progress.

> ... and it is quite different from the early days of Unicode itself, 
> where there was a groundswell of pent-up demand for a solution to the 
> fragmented character encoding landscape; the discussions quickly 
> became about the best way to do that, and about how to ensure that the 
> result would be supported.

Yes, fine, and a good job was done and has benefitted many many people 
around the world. That was then and that was how things happened then 
for that situation. Now is now and this is a different approach for a 
different situation.

> The current effort starts from an unrelated problem (Unicode not 
> wanting to administer emoji applications) and in my analysis, 
> seriously puts the cart before the horse.

Well I was not aware of that purported reason, but then I am not part of 
the inner loop so you may well therefore have more information about the 
motivation than is accessible to me.

William Overington

Wednesday 13 November 2019