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Bitcoin is Stupid and Does Not Deserve an Emoji (blog post) (thedabbler.patatas.ca)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by smallpatatas@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world

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35 crypto companies got together to make a change dot org petition called "Bitcoin Deserves an Emoji".

F that

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[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There really isn't a difference between a character and an emoji beyond an emoji being a stylized rendering of a character, or a character whose use is intended as a pictograph.

https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Introduction

They're all just Unicode code points, although I suppose there's some distinction between the characters with more context specific meaning or the ones that are more apt to modification a la 🧑‍⚕️👩🏿‍⚕️. But you've also got 💲 and $, where "bold dollar sign" is often represented as green, but "dollar sign" tends to be represented in contextual style. Is ☣ a character or an emoji? What about the thousands of "other symbols" as defined by the Unicode spec which may or may not have special character renderings depending on your platform and font?

And yeah, I didn't know that character existed, so now it's doubly confusing why anyone is asking for anything. The symbol has meaning, and it's in the big book of meaningful symbols. Not sure what more they want.

[–] lunarul@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

There's no ambiguity. Emoji are characters in the emoticons code block (U+1F600..U+1F64F). Emoji are indeed a subset of characters, but anything outside that block is not an emoji.

[–] ricecake@sh.itjust.works 0 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Gotcha, so ⌚(U+231A, miscellaneous technical block) isn't an emoji, despite it clearly being a pictograph, and there are only 80 emoji?

I feel like this definition isn't in line with either the lay definition of emoji, nor the technical definition

Emoji are pictographs (pictorial symbols) that are typically presented in a colorful cartoon form and used inline in text. They represent things such as faces, weather, vehicles and buildings, food and drink, animals and plants, or icons that represent emotions, feelings, or activities.

People often ask how many emoji are in the Unicode Standard. This question does not have a simple answer, because there is no clear line separating which pictographic characters should be displayed with a typical emoji style.

Emoji are seriously just Unicode characters that sometimes get rendered as a fancy image. That's it. There's an entire bit about how different characters have different conventional presentations and a codified system of "default" for image or "text".

The presentation of a given emoji character depends on the environment, whether or not there is an emoji or text presentation selector, and the default presentation style (emoji versus text). In informal environments like texting and chats, it is more appropriate for most emoji characters to appear with a colorful emoji presentation, and only get a text presentation with a text presentation selector. Conversely, in formal environments such as word processing, it is generally better for emoji characters to appear with a text presentation, and only get the colorful emoji presentation with the emoji presentation selector.

That's why there's things like ☣️ and ☣. Same codepoint, but different presentation hints. (I'm assuming that our various systems will do the right thing and capture the presentation hints, otherwise I'm going to look very odd putting the same symbol over and over :-) )

[–] lunarul@lemmy.world 0 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I rushed to just grab that codeblock from Wikipedia. But the selection of which characters are considered emoji is not arbitrary. The Unicode Consortium (their Unicode Emoji Standard and Research Working Group to be exact) publishes those list and guidelines on how they should be rendered. I believe the most recent version of the standard is Emoji 15.1.

Edit: I realized I'm going off track here by just reacting to comments and forgetting my initial point. The difference I was initially alluding to is in selection criteria. The emoji. for assigning a character a Unicode codepoint is very different from the criteria for creating a new emoji. Bitcoin has a unique symbol and there is a real need to use that symbol in written material. Having a unicode character for it solves that problem, and indeed one was added. The Emoji working group has other selection criteria (which is why you have emoji for eggplant and flying money, and other things that are not otherwise characters. So the fact that a certain character exists, despite its very limited use, has no bearing on whether something else should have an emoji to represent it.