Posted by surprisetalk 1/27/2026
Someone writes a text in 2016. Three years later, despite the text data remaining unchanged, the semantics are completely different because all vendors decided to change what the text should look like.
I'm not sure if this has ever happened in the history of text. The worst thing we had was encoding issues that were pretty obvious when it happened. Now you need to be aware of every change ever made to emojis and divine which platform the author was writing from to be able to tell what the message was actually supposed to be.
It's not that much of an issue and we largely converged.
Some 20 years ago a ICQ-like instant messenger in Poland called Gadu-Gadu has become the default way of communication on the Internet for us here. GG had own set of emoticons but only few of really big set were in constant use [1; set for KDE's Koperte but it was same on Windows native client]. I doubt that anything have changed and emoji are being treated in same way: a small set is used and rest is largely skipped.
There was this little thing about GG's emoticon that when you typed "??" and "!!" application would turn these into looped gifs. People were so accustomed to that effect they were doing double punctuation elsewhere on the Internet and even in real life.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/e5/36/0ae536826bb1cf643e6f05066...
There's no "neutral" rather its just "white without specifying it"
I grew up in two multi-cultural places so do not have the same default perceptions.
England
Japan
Turkey
Sri Lanka
South Africa
Language changes all the time, emoji are just part of that.
If emojis were really text this would be a clear violation of data integrity.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: I still don't understand why anyone thought standardizing emojis as Unicode code points (without defining what exactly they should look like, i.e. leaving the glyphs almost entirely up to the font & UI/UX designers) was a good idea. I mean, it's not like facial expressions on their own are not already difficult enough to decipher, they had to add even more ambiguity by letting each app designer choose different glyphs? It's incredibly easy for the tone and meaning of a text message to change depending on what its emojis look like.
With a sufficient number of users of an API,
it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
all observable behaviors of your system
will be depended on by somebody
Imagine outlawing comic sans because "letters must be serious" or smth
…and that's precisely why I complained that emojis have been standardized as Unicode code points, with their design being left to font designers. You just re-iterated that this is a consequence of using (abusing) the charset, which I had already acknowledged.
What's interesting is how the market solved it anyway—everyone just converged on Apple's designs because that's what users expected. Not through spec, but through sheer gravity.