New Public Review on QID emoji

wjgo_10009@btinternet.com via Unicode unicode at unicode.org
Wed Oct 30 12:41:16 CDT 2019


Hello everyone

I have been reading about QID emoji and what is proposed.

At present I have a question to which I cannot find the answer.

Is the QID emoji format, if approved by the Unicode Technical Committee 
going to be sent to the ISO/IEC 10646 committee for consideration by 
that committee?

As the QID emoji format is in a Unicode Technical Standard and does not 
include the encoding of any new _atomic_ characters, I am concerned that 
the answer to the above question may well be along the lines of "No" 
maybe with some reasoning as to why not.

Yet will a QID emoji essentially be _de facto_ a character even if not 
_de jure_ a character?

For a QID emoji will not just be "markup using existing characters from 
the ISO/IEC 10646 standard that is synchronized with Unicode", such as 
would be a markup that anyone could devise for use in his or her 
research and experimentation or indeed some public use, it will be a 
Unicode Inc. endorsed "whatever" that is very closely linked to The 
Unicode Standard even if not deemed to be part of it.

As I understand the situation, in some countries people take no (formal) 
notice as such of The Unicode Standard but rely solely on ISO/IEC 10646. 
Often this may well present no practical problems in information 
technology and its applications because the two standards are 
synchronized each with the other.

Yet if QID emoji are implemented by Unicode Inc. without also being 
implemented by ISO/IEC 10646 then that could lead to future problems, 
notwithstanding any _de jure_ situation that QID emoji are not 
characters, because they will be much more than Private Use characters 
yet less than characters that are in ISO/IEC 10646.

I am in favour of the encoding of the QID emoji mechanism and its 
practical application. However I wonder about what are the consequences 
for interoperability and communication if QID emoji become used - maybe 
quite widely - and yet the tag sequences are not discernable in meaning 
from ISO/IEC 10646 or any related ISO/IEC documents.

William Overington

Wednesday 30 October 2019








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