QID Emoij (was: Re: Wireless Connection Symbol)

[Mark E. Shoulson]

{Sorry this is out of date; I discovered my email to the unicode list 
wasn't going through.}

I'm not sure how much I could add to the points that have already been 
made, but just to stand up and be counted, I also think QID emoji are an 
awful idea and I can barely believe they are even being considered 
seriously.  The possibilities are just too broad, etc... what everyone 
else said. We'd do better with a highly-compressed (vector?) image 
format that could somehow squeeze decent pictures into a few dozen 
characters.


On 5/27/20 12:18 PM, Sławomir Osipiuk via Unicode wrote:
> The issue to be resolved here lies in the process for adding emojis. 
> The current process is too onerous and slow. I can imagine a new 
> process, that isn't bound to a regular schedule, and that allows 
> eminently useful and needed emojis to be fast-tracked to approval in 
> days, not months. Perhaps an entire plane could be reserved for such 
> emojis - 65K should be enough for anyone, right? ;) Perhaps there 
> could be a provisional or probationary approval granted to certain 
> emojis, or at least a "reservation" system for code points. A vendor 
> could reserve spaces with emojis they plan to add (with reasonable 
> limits, of course). There could be a public voting system to add or 
> approve emojis in near-real-time based on thresholds for approval. 
> It's 2020; we have the technology. Provisional emojis or code points 
> reservations that don't see use/support after some amount of time are 
> rejected and code points are allowed to be reused. Those that see use 
> or public support are given final appro!
> val and become bound by stability requirements. The Unicode Consortium 
> is still involved, but less so, relying more on automated metrics than 
> meetings, though they would still have veto power if there is some 
> valid subjective factor to consider.

This is fairly well-said.  The problem is obviously real, or real enough 
to bug people: it takes too darn long to get emoji into Unicode.  It 
takes a long time to get anything into Unicode, but most of the things 
we're putting in at this stage of the game are rare characters, 
small-userbase scripts, etc, and even the people who would use them have 
been doing okay without them for a while. Emoji have a different type of 
demand.  Emoji become popular, and even "necessary," _after_ they are in 
the standard, lots of people are itching to use each incoming proposal, 
and their userbase is a very large and outspoken segment of 
computer-users.  A provisional something-or-other?  Not entirely a bad 
idea.  Lots of details perhaps to work out, to avoid assorted "horror" 
situations (reusing a code-point??  so my serious document about pokémon 
might in later years appear with emoji of Linux distributions??? oh, 
won't someone think of the stability!) while still making it all work 
out.  No, I don't know how to solve all those issues. But the idea bears 
consideration, more than QID emoji do, IMO.

~mark