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by pavlov
3049 days ago
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IMO you’ve been unfairly downvoted, as you’re correct that the emoji illustrations indeed are owned by Apple. The fault lies with the Unicode consortium for opening this can of worms. The standard should have been reserved for outline letter forms only. Adding a set of full-color illustrations that expands every year was madness. It’s especially bad for embedded devices that need to render text. It used to be that you could ship vector fonts for the major global scripts in less than 500k, and you could feel fairly confident that new glyphs aren’t randomly added. Today you need to ship an emoji font and make sure that your font engine can render color graphics. Google offers the only semi-decent free color emoji font, and it weighs about 7 MB. That’s a vexing increase in system font footprint just so that there’s a poop illustration on disk when needed. You also need to update the set every year when the standard adds “depressed poop” or “sulking lizardman” or whatever. From a UX point of view, it sucks because the free emoji font doesn’t look like the Apple one (because that look is copyrighted!), and inevitably someone will complain about it. At least HN has the good sense to filter the emoji junk from
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It seems like it goes even deeper than that. I've been noticing things like <face><unicode female symbol> that I thought was some sort of meme that I just didn't get. It turns out, that's how "older devices" (the latest version of Chrome in my case) renders the new emoji that you can attach a gender to.
I agree that it all kind of went off the deep end. You can easily come up with an infinite number of pictures that you might want to attach to a text message, but there aren't an infinite number of codepoints. So the race to add emoji will never end, and it will never be possibly to satisfy everyone. I would have just given up. At least I can include a picture of a tanabata tree with any and all text!