Andrew West wrote,
> Why should we not expect the conventional Unicode character encoding
> mode to apply to emoji?
Remember when William Overington used to post about encoding colours,
sometimes accompanied by novel suggestions about how they could be
encoded or referenced in plain-text?
Here's a very polite reply from John Hudson from 2000,
http://unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/Archives-Old/UML024/1042.html
...and, over time, many of the replies to William Overington's colorful
suggestions were less than polite. But it was clear that colors were
out-of-scope for a computer plain-text encoding standard.
So I don't expect the conventional model to apply to emoji because it
didn't; if it had, they'd not have been encoded. Since they're in
there, the conventional model does not apply. Of course, the
conventions have changed along with the concept of what's acceptable in
plain-text.
Since emoji are an open-ended evolving phenomenon, there probably has to
be a provision for expansion. Any idea about them having been a finite
set overlooked the probability of open-endedness and the impracticality
of having only the original subset covered in plain-text while additions
would be banished to higher level protocols.
Thank you for the information about current emoji additions being
unrelated to vendors. I have to confess that I haven't kept up-to-date
on the emoji.
Maybe I should have said that emoji are fan-driven.
