![]() I’ll get back to all this in a minute, but something that’s left out of emoji discussions is that the English-speaking world was developing a similar idea. Also, this is precisely the problem that Unicode was invented to solve. This is kind of like how Shift JIS is mostly compatible with ASCII, except that for some reason it has the yen sign ¥ in place of the ASCII backslash \, producing hilarious results. And when these characters started to leak outside of Japan, they had no hope whatsoever of displaying as anything other than garbage. They came up with tables for translating between carriers, but that wouldn’t help if your friend tried to send you an image that your phone just didn’t have. Naturally, they used different sets of images, but often in a different order, so the same character might be an apple on one phone and a banana on another. Naturally, other carriers added their own variations. Shift JIS is Japan’s equivalent to ASCII, and had a lot more unused space, and that’s where early emoji were put.) Computers always deal with bytes, which can go up to 255, but ASCII only lists characters up to 127 - so everything from 128 to 255 is just unused space. So in ASCII, for example, a capital “A” is passed around as the number 65. (Quick background, because I’d like this to be understandable by a general audience: computers only understand numbers, not text, so we need a “character set” that lists all the characters you can type and what numbers represent them. Its messenger included some 180 small pixel-art images you could type as though they were text, because they were text, encoded using unused space in Shift JIS. The Unicode Technical Report on emoji also goes over some of this.Įmoji are generally traced back to the Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo, which in February 1999 released a service called i-mode which powered a line of wildly popular early smartphones. Both popular media and a lot of tech circles tend to assume that “emoji” de facto means Apple’s particular font. I love seeing plain text become more expressive and more universal.īut, Internet, I’ve noticed a worrying trend.
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