QID emoji (from Re: The encoding of flags)

[William_J_G Overington]

Rebecca Bettencourt wrote:

> Having it work properly everywhere would only happen if Unicode 
> approved it or a third party with the clout of Apple or Google 
> implemented it. And...

>> If there was sufficient user demand for it.

Sort of like the Webdings glyphs.

Is it the case that Microsoft of its own decision, nothing to do with an 
existing user demand, designed the Webdings glyphs, put them in a font 
and bundled the font as a "free with" font in with the Windows operating 
system? So end users found them available, then used them, so then they 
were widely used.

If I remember correctly, when those glyphs were later proposed to be 
encoded into The Unicode Standard, there was a little speculation from 
outsiders as to whether some other large businesses would object, but in 
the event they did not.

However, suspending your disbelief to the extent necessary as if 
watching Star Trek with its holodeck, suppose some people read my novels 
and consider that they would like a system as in the novels all 
implemented in real life unambiguously and interoperably between 
platforms in email systems and web pages and on mobile telephones, how 
could that "user demand" have any effect when the idea is not originated 
BY a big business, nor AT a university, but by someone NOT representing 
an organization?

What does "sufficient" in the phrase "sufficient user demand" mean in 
practice?

Is the bar so high as to be unreachable in practice?

William Overington

Friday 8 October 2021

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/attachments/20211008/47338c65/attachment.htm>