Emotes

[Sławomir Osipiuk]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2022 at 12:10 PM William_J_G Overington via Unicode
<unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:
>
> Can we discuss emotes please?
>

Inline image content is very firmly outside the scope of Unicode and
practically screams "higher-level protocol".

We should not be inventing yet another markup and/or syntax for things
that are solved problems. If you want to embed images in your text,
use an <img> tag with a base64 data-URI or an external URL, as
appropriate.

The one legitimate issue is that maybe you want the syntax to be
default-ignorable "for free" on platforms that don't support it and
the existing unicode tag characters look mighty tempting. In that
area, the Unicode Standard can be a little helpful by clarifying and
formalizing the permitted use of tag characters for other protocols,
but it should in no way be defining those protocols itself. Maybe
declare U+E0010 through U+E001F private-use.

That's about it. Unicode is for text. Even emoji as single characters
are a pretty big stretch. Emoji ZWJ sequences even more so. I don't
think we should be stretching any further.

Sławomir Osipiuk