Van Anderson <vanis...@boil.afraid.org> wrote:
Emoticons (as emoji) are exchanged as plain text. The only consideration that changed was whether they should be considered as markup or not. Eventually, it became clear that they no longer do classify as markup, but as plain text. This was not a change inpolicy, it was a development in evidence.
I still find it annoying that it only "became clear" that emoji were plain text when Google and three large Japanese corporations developed a business need to interchange and index them. The long-standing rules against encoding novel and idiosyncratic symbols (and even logos, in early proposals) do indeed appear to have been compromised by a change in policy.
However, the emoji proposal became far less objectionable (at least to me) when color and animation ceased to be considered as defining characteristics of plain-text characters, and when the proposed "compatibility characters" for corporate logos were removed, so I'm simply waiting for the churn surrounding emoji to stop before considering additional symbol proposals. (As recently as a few months ago, there were still proposals to change character names and reference glyphs.)
-- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | http://www.ewellic.org RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 | ietf-languages @ http://is.gd/2kf0s
