That’s pretty much what the emoji situation is today. I don’t understand what the actual use case is for the requirement that emojis differ across platforms.
Yes, I realize they are widely used, but they are widely used despite this stupidity, not because of it.
Do you have any examples of current emojis that clearly have a very different meaning on different platforms? What you're saying might have been true 5+ years ago, but over time emojis have become more and more similar.
In addition to that, almost all emoji keyboards now autocomplete the emoji based on standard names, so if you search for "disappointed" on most any emoji keyboard, you will get the same face.
The famous example is the pistol emoji, which is rendered as either a real gun or a water gun depending on platform. Lots of scope for misunderstanding there!
This has not been true since early 2018. See: https://blog.emojipedia.org/all-major-vendors-commit-to-gun-... There was only a couple of years when vendors rendered it differently, and they worked toward a consensus, as they have for many other emojis.
Even if there was no vendor consensus, I'm not sure what the misunderstanding could be with this particular emoji. There is only one pistol emoji, and regardless of whether it is rendered as a water pistol or a revolver, it still is used to represent the concept of a pistol. There are better examples of emojis that used to be displayed with a facial expression or hand gesture that had a relatively different meaning depending on the platform. For example face with rolling eyes, person tipping hand (information desk person) and so on.
It still rendered as a revolver on the phone I used to write that comment. Guess I'm still on 2017 Android. Please do not invite me to any water gun parties.
> Do you have any examples of current emojis that clearly have a very different meaning on different platforms? What you're saying might have been true 5+ years ago, but over time emojis have become more and more similar.
Well... yes? That's because avalys is obviously correct. The "solution" defined by the Unicode consortium is so spectacularly stupid that everyone has unanimously agreed to move away from it by synchronizing their images, because it makes no sense to send an image unless you know what it will look like.
Rendering differently on an older platform is also an important difference (consider those who can't afford the latest phones). E.g. the gun one has a very different meaning on (some) older platforms from newer ones.
I think this is basically what's happening on the JCK plane with glyphs that have the same code, but slightly different representations depending on the font (e.g. Chinese or Japanese), with potentially wildly different meanings in the language they are used.
To your point, this is an aspect where integrating and regularily adding emojis to unicode pushed a very technical system under popular attention, and attracted a lot of people from unrelated backgrounds who now have to understand how it works and what its goals in the first place.
> I think this is basically what's happening on the JCK plane with glyphs that have the same code, but slightly different representations depending on the font (e.g. Chinese or Japanese), with potentially wildly different meanings in the language they are used.
It was even more dumb when they did it for CJK. Unicode is now neither fish nor fowl; you can't rely on things to look the same in different places, but you can't rely on them to mean the same either; there's no proper separation of concerns because they decided it's fine for the meaning of a character to change based on the font you're using.
I kind of get why we got here, as encodings were a quagmire for a long time, and coming to a real clean, everybody's happy solution with unicode looked completely unrealistic.
We now have way better compatibility, got to settle for one encoding in most cases, and the annoyances are for now somewhat manageable (if/when China opens more to the global net, it might be a different story). Installing fonts is still easier than adding encoding compatibilities.
Yes, I realize they are widely used, but they are widely used despite this stupidity, not because of it.