> Unification is a mistake. But 囍 has nothing to do with unification.
I'm not saying it does, I'm saying Unification illustrates the fact that the Consortium's decision-making with respect to CJK has changed over time, has frequently been illogical, and shouldn't be pointed at as an example of anything good or sane or worthy of precedent.
The fact that 囍 has a code point but 福倒 doesn't have a codepoint is another example of the Consortium being unnecessarily reductive and intransigent about CJK.
> Do you think that 福倒 should have a code point?
Yes. If we want to be able to talk about it in text (like now), I want to be able to encode it in a standardized way.
> Should they have unicode points?
I'd lean towards no, as they're one-offs, not something broader that people want to discuss and use in text. But I'd be ok with adding them, too. We're not running out of space. There's no value in making CJK so much harder to interop with than everything else, in general.
> Yes. If we want to be able to talk about it in text (like now), I want to be able to encode it in a standardized way.
This doesn't make any sense. We talk about things in text by using words, not direct representations. A dog emoji is not necessary or desirable for discussing dogs in text, and a 福倒 emoji is not necessary or desirable for discussing 福倒s in text.
Should the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty be edited to replace the cumbersome phrase "statue of liberty" with the more modern and convenient U+1F5FD 'STATUE OF LIBERTY'?
> A dog emoji is not necessary or desirable for discussing dogs in text, and a 福倒 emoji is not necessary or desirable for discussing 福倒s in text.
"Necessary" is an ill-defined and reductive way of looking at communication. History has shown us that you can't draw bright lines between things you, in the abstract, have decided are the "necessary" subset, and expect the world to follow along.
Linguists have come to understand that you can only describe and follow human, behaviour, not prescribe it.
Anyways, humans plainly found it necessary to annotate their text messages with pictoral indicators of their mood, to the point where it became so widely spread and such a mess that we felt it desirable to standardize the code-point representations. That it isn't desirable in all circumstances or appropriate in all registers of formality does not mean that it isn't an emergent behaviour which will continue to arise whether or not it is "necessary".
tl;dr I don't really give a shit that "dog emoji" isn't appropriate for an academic text on canine surgery. It's more than sufficient to me that it is used millions of times in text messages between regular human beings. Text needn't be formal text to deserve respect in encoding.
> "Necessary" is an ill-defined and reductive way of looking at communication.
I took "If we want to be able to talk about it in text (like now), I want to be able to encode it in a standardized way" as implying that the two clauses were related to each other. Saying "if we want to be able to talk about it" means you're talking about what's necessary for that purpose.
I'm not saying it does, I'm saying Unification illustrates the fact that the Consortium's decision-making with respect to CJK has changed over time, has frequently been illogical, and shouldn't be pointed at as an example of anything good or sane or worthy of precedent.
The fact that 囍 has a code point but 福倒 doesn't have a codepoint is another example of the Consortium being unnecessarily reductive and intransigent about CJK.
> Do you think that 福倒 should have a code point?
Yes. If we want to be able to talk about it in text (like now), I want to be able to encode it in a standardized way.
> Should they have unicode points?
I'd lean towards no, as they're one-offs, not something broader that people want to discuss and use in text. But I'd be ok with adding them, too. We're not running out of space. There's no value in making CJK so much harder to interop with than everything else, in general.