[masklinn]

> IIRC Unicode was intended to encode and represent text for writing systems.

Nonsensical garbage. The Arrows, Technical, Box Drawing, Block Elements, Geometric Shapes and Miscellaneous Symbols blocks were all part of Unicode 1.0.

> It seems a lot more sensible to actually send the picture you want to send, or a link to that picture, because that doesn't need to be interpreted differently by each client... just rendered.

1. Except now you need to design a way to design and render mixed content.

2. If that's your argument, why even have letters and fonts? Just send the right images.

[peterwwillis]

Uh, it's not nonsense or garbage, for multiple reasons. The first and foremost is that just because the first version supported arrows and geometric shapes does not mean it couldn't have been invented as an encoding for writing systems. The second reason is that I actually read what it was created for. https://www.unicode.org/history/summary.html The purpose was to encode the characters used by written languages for expressing language in a legible form. This includes multiple forms of graphemes.

Apps already have ways to render mixed content. How do you think you can see both text and pictures next to each other? E-mail has supported this for decades. The linked article even explicitly mentions how different apps render different image sets for the same emojis.

We have different fonts for several reasons, and sometimes we do send entire fonts in order to render our messages correctly. What font you use, and how you choose to render graphemes, is completely up to the application. What I'm proposing is a more interoperable way of sharing mixed content, which people clearly already want to do.