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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 1/9/2023 9:09 PM, Doug Ewell via
Unicode wrote:<br>
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">3. Emoji vs text presentation.</pre>
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to me that's more clearly pseudo-encoding than some of the other
things now possible with emoji. It's because the wrong presentation
is nearly always really wrong, so there's no common fallback.<br>
<br>
And add to that, that the introduction of the wrong default made
existing applications and texts suddenly fail, and you have one of
the worst blunders in Unicode's encoding history.<br>
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4. "Extreme" ligaturing involving emoji ZWJ sequences, regional tags
becoming flags, and other pseudo-encoding.
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">I would actually consider things like bold, italics, and color to be less of an affront to “plain text” than an emoji presentation form or a sequence that adds up to “woman firefighter with medium-dark skin tone.” Granted ECMA-48 can be used for effects that are less plain-texty than bold, italics, and color.
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<p>In some ways most of the emoji sequences are really more akin to
making new characters by adding diacritic marks, or making new
shapes in context, the way shapes fuse in Indic conjuncts.</p>
<p>A skintone in some sense has more similarity to a diacritic on a
vowel; just because it's not a mark, but a shade, doesn't erase
the similarity. The whole visual design space for emoji is
different. While color is simply an attribute on text, skintone
hews closer to a semantic component in the way it works. <br>
<br>
The same goes for other colors as well, a "black cat" and a
generic kitty have distinct, if overlapping semantic space, and on
the level of an individual symbol.<br>
<br>
The concept of semantic ligatures, like the female astronaut, is
interesting, it's a departure from purely graphical constructs
like stacks, conjuncts and ligatures, but while most Latin
ligatures are optional, many conjuncts are not, and using a
fallback will alter meaning, again on the individual grapheme
level.<br>
<br>
Formatting / styling to me is distinguished by something that's
conceptually always applied to a run of text, and usually not on
runs of length one. The main exception to that was mathematical
notation, and we opted to make a principled exception, precisely
because semantic mapping to highly specific shapes for an
individual symbol is or should not be the task of "styling".<br>
<br>
Flag sequences and the like are true examples of pseudo coding.
Introducing a scheme that maps arbitrary code point sequences to a
symbol in a way that depends on definitions maintained outside the
Unicode Standard. It's the clearest case of injecting another
character set (or a lego system to representing one) into the
Standard that I've seen.<br>
<br>
We could have done the same with three-letter codes for currency
symbols, but we didn't, and that marks the difference.</p>
<p>A./<br>
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