RE: Are there [start] emoji [end] style codes?

Lee Shallis wrote:

> [Are there [start] emoji [end] style codes?] If not I suggest making
> them so you're no longer constrained to the tiny range of potential
> codes that unicode offers.

Unicode has more than 800,000 unassigned code points, which I don’t consider “tiny.” Continuing to dip into this pool is considered preferable to introducing a new stateful “begin/end” mechanism, and all of the problems that those bring along.

James Kass replied:

> The inappropriate religious material after the message should have
> been removed by the moderators.

+1, emphatically.

Phil Smith III replied (to Lee):

> For starters, you’re confusing Unicode with encoding.

This confused me greatly, until I realized Phil meant “... with ISO 2022-style shift-in/shift-out encoding.”

Technically, you can in fact combine Unicode with ISO 2022 (for whatever reason), but adding a new mechanism, outside of Unicode, to encode emoji makes no sense at all.

> Now, I can imagine modifier characters, like combining accents, that
> would change skin tones etc.—but I’d rather not: combiners have caused
> enough trouble, and I’d hate to see new ones added.

Um, isn’t that how skin tones are specified already?

--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org