Re: New Public Review on QID emoji

[Asmus Freytag via Unicode]

On 11/12/2019 8:41 AM, wjgo_10...@btinternet.com via Unicode wrote: Asmus Freytag wrote as follows. While I have a certain understanding for the underlying concerns, it still is the case that this proposal promises to be a bad example of "leading standardization": throwing out a spec in the hopes it may be taken up and take off, instead of something that meets an expressed need of the stakeholders and that they are eagerly awaiting. I suppose that it could be called "leading standardization" but I think that that is a good thing. Unicode has traditionally been locked into the past. If a symbol could be found carved in stone years ago than that was fine but anything for the future that could possibly become useful was a huge insuperable problem. Yet for me "could possibly become useful" is a good reason for encoding, and QID emoji opens up great futuristic possibilities. For me the big problem with the proposal at present are the restrictions upon which QID items are valid to become encoded as QID emoji. So anything abstract is locked out. That to me is an unnecessary restriction, yet it could easily be removed. Yet abstract shapes are important in communication. If leading standardization was such a good thing in communication, why don't we see more "dictionaries of words not yet in use"? After all, it would be a huge benefit for people coining new terms to have their definitions already worked out. Nothing inherent in the technology of dictionaries has directly prevented overtures in that direction, but it overwhelmingly remains a path not taken. One wonders why. I regard QID emoji as a research project. The specification may need some alterations, maybe it is just the start of a whole new path of exploration in communication, much wider than emoji. I am a researcher and I try to find what is good in an idea and focus on that and think where a new idea can lead, applying critical consideration of ideas, yet trying to move forward rather than seizing on problems found as a reason for dismissing the whole idea. So find the problems, try to think round them, try to go forward. Look for what could be done and if it is good, try to do it. Try to go forward rather than quash. Research and standardization are both worthwhile endeavors, but they are fundamentally different in outlook. Standardization is about a community agreeing on a fixed common way of doing something. It inherently "squashes" other alternative ways of doing the same thing, in the interest of gaining the efficiencies inherent in having a single approach; even where it's theoretically not the best. That, then, finally undermines Unicode's implied guarantee as being the medium for unambiguous interchange. Giving up that guarantee seems a bad bargain. Many recent emoji encoding proposals seem to delight, as if required, in providing multiple meanings for each newly proposed character. There was a talk at the Unicode and Internationalization Conference a few years ago on what are the meanings of emoji. I was not there but there is a video available on YouTube. Emoji, just like words, are amenable to idiomatic use. Such idiomatic use will always be at odds with whatever formal meaning (or dictionary definition) is associated with a character, and being such a fundamental aspect of how language functions, it's unlikely to be a passing phenomenon. I'm not sure that the people administering the standard have fully woken up to what that means, or what is required of emoji so that they can best function when used in this way. Linking emoji to an open-ended set of supposedly well-defined semantic signifiers is simply adding a bigger dictionary, while removing the one key aspect of what written communication depends on: the guaranteed status of the written symbol as being in the shared canon of writing system elements, and one that is recognized by the recipients as such. Having a huge set of potential semantic values that are unrelated to a specific shape and not guaranteed to be shared exacerbates the existing problems, rather than pointing to a fix. In that sense, the proposed approach is truly a solution in search of a question. Just because you can write something that is a very detailed specification doesn't mean that it is, or ever should be, a standard. A./ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ldSVbXbjl4 William Overington Tuesday 12 November 2019