DjangoCon Europe 2016 - The Power ⚡️ and Responsibility 😓 of Unicode Adoption ✨

rixx

2016-03-31

Speaker: Katie McLaughlin (twitter) is an Operations Engineer.

Emojis are broken.

Origins

ASCII was 7 bit, extended ASCII for Europeans 8 bit, and then we got unicode with 32 bit (or utf-8 for size, since we only use 10% of unicode space).

Old Emojis

There was Windings, there was the peace sign, which is in unicode since the 90s, but mostly there were telecommunication companies' emojis, which were then made consistent by a combined effort of apple and google to introduce emojis into unicode standard v6.

Unicode Standards

v6: Emojis join Unicode (2010)
v6.1: Faces get added (2012)
v7: spock gesture, chipmunk, unicorn (2014)
v8: rock symbol, taco, upside-down smiley (2015)
v9: selfie, bacon, duck, spoon, whisky, egg (2016)
v10: more takeaway food (2017)

import unicodedata unicodedata.name('⚡️')

Get Emojis accepted

Emojis are decided on by the Emoji Board of the Unicode Consortium.

Good:

backwards compatibility
frequently used things (substantiated by google trends or similar, compared to, say, hamburgers)
distinctiveness from other emoji
completeness (eg add missing zodiac signs)

Bad:

overly specific
open-ended categories
already represented (even in combination)
no branding
no fads

Best Practices

provide emojis yourself if you want any control over how they look
add alt-texts
refer to emojis by their standardized name
use the twitter set (permissive license) or the emojione set, which is completely open source