This is a bullshit argument that never gets applied to any other live language. The characters are different, people who actually use them in daily life recognise them as conveying different things. If a thumbs up with a different skin tone is a different character then a different pattern of lines is definitely a different character.

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Dylan16807 7 months ago | parent [-]

> If a thumbs up with a different skin tone is a different character

Is it? The skin tone modifier is serving the same purpose as a variant selector for the CJK codepoint would be.

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lmm 7 months ago | parent [-]

The underlying implementation mechanism is not the issue. If unicode had actual support for Japanese characters so that when one e.g. converted text from Shift-JIS (in the default, supported way) one could be confident that one's characters would not change into different characters, I wouldn't be complaining, whether the implementation mechanism involved variant selectors or otherwise.

	▲	Dylan16807 7 months ago \| parent [-]
		Okay, that's fair. The support for the selectors is very half-assed and there's no other good mechanism.