The general view of the Unicode people is that this is a formatting issue, rather than a character encoding issue.

While I agree it can be annoying at times, I somewhat tend to agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want. And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic? CJK?

▲

gnulinux 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't want to debate, I just want to note that as a person who writes $1_G$ everyday, and also maintain Unicode char'd codebases (Agda) where have subscript G would be life saving: We understand that Unicode people think ^x _x is a formatting issue. It simply isn't any more than quotes, parenthesis, brackets are formatting. Subscript and superscript are their own thing regardless of formatting and they carry meaning and semantics. The simplest proof is $^{-1}$ which means "inverse" and has nothing to do with minus or 1 symbol, it's not a formatting thereof, it simply means "inverse", the same way recycle emoji mean "recycle".

▲

nabla9 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Emojis are also formatting issue. Smileys: :) ;) :o

I don't understand why we need to add small images into character set. Hieroglyphs for those who can't read?

▲

npteljes 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

They look very different than their counterparts constructed from text. Also, many of them cannot really be constructed with regular characters.

People also have been adding smileys to their communication as early as the 1700s.

▲

Freak_NL 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because language is use. Billions of people use emoji in their every day textual communications. Unicode exists to encode all textual communication.

▲

nabla9 3 days ago | parent [-]

Emoji symbols don't emerge from language use.

Corporations like Apple, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Facebook invent them. And pay tens of thousands a year for Unicode consortium so that they can vote to add them to the standard.

They are corporate symbols.

	▲	npteljes 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Corporations didn't invent "them", but they definitely control them. Never mind the consortium, it's the corporations themselves who actually create the drawing that we see. And they definitely also created the typefaces that we use, like Times New Roman. But overall, I don't think something is bad just because it's corporate. Do you think this is a bad influence of some sorts?
	▲	Freak_NL 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Emoji were in widespread use in Japan on the mobile phones of the generation before the smartphone. That is a corpus of many years of human communication which falls within the goals of Unicode to unlock. Those emoji may have been invented by AU, Softbank, and NTTDocomo, but they exist. The recent additions come from a variety of proposals; most seem to be independent initiatives. Big tech embraced emoji, but they got in the standard without them. Their widespread use was pretty much a given.

▲

3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

▲

eviks 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

But the currently encoded sub/supersripts counter that general view?

> agree as there is tons of useful formatting that one could want

So? Should we stop adding emojis just because the potential is infinite?

> And if we do Latin alphabet, then should we also do Greek? Cyrillic? Arabic?

Add a combining prefix/suffix and you wouldn't need to do encode every single char from those alphabets. But also the general answer exists: whatever is commonly useful.