One minor thing that I am not super enthusiastic about when it comes to emojis is that they are typically colored. This has two drawbacks:
In a number of environments, it’s possible to set text color. This is only really practical because most characters are not colored, so the color can be variable. If we start introducing colored characters in general, that stops working. It also has at least the potential to create issues for colorblind users (though we could potentially also create workarounds).
It means that onscreen text may not be practical to present well in a monochrome environment, like a monochrome e-ink display or printed on paper. Traditionally, if you can see text onscreen, you can print it and it’s still legible on a monochrome printer. But, for example, there’s U+1FA75, LIGHT BLUE HEART: 🩵, and U+1FA77, PINK HEART: 🩷. Most non-sight-impaired users can probably distinguish between the two on a color display, but I suspect that a situation where one was using it to write text — maybe using blue to indicate male and pink to indicate female or something like that — wouldn’t be very easy to distinguish after being printed on a monochrome printer.
Both of these are kind of minor complaints. In practice, I just don’t see a whole lot of emoji use, and haven’t run into practical issues. But I do think that if we wanted to adopt a writing system that incorporated color, I’d probably favor a more-considered approach than just throwing whatever someone happens to propose in.
One other minor issue is that some emojis have political or social weight that get people upset. For example, you have U+1F52B, PISTOL.
Some people felt that people shouldn’t be able to portray an actual pistol, so changed the thing to a water pistol. I personally think that the whole debate is kind of absurd, because one can just write “pistol”, but it clearly has been a topic of political infighting.
The pistol emoji (U+1F52B 🔫 PISTOL) is an emoji defined by the Unicode Consortium as depicting a “handgun” or “revolver”.[1]
It was historically displayed as a handgun on most computers (although Google once used a blunderbuss);[2] as early as 2013, Microsoft chose to replace the glyph with a ray gun,[3] and in 2016 Apple replaced their glyph with a water pistol.[4] Since then, its rendering has been inconsistent across vendors. Microsoft changed its glyph back to an icon of a revolver during 2016 and 2017, before switching it to a (differently-styled) ray gun; in 2018, Google and Samsung changed their devices’ rendering of the emoji to a water pistol,[2] as well as the websites Facebook and Twitter. In 2024, Twitter (by then known as “X”) chose to restore the glyph of a handgun, although instead of a revolver it used a semi-automatic M1911.[5]
Based on the above, it looks like Elon Musk moved things back to being a classic American handgun.
But, point is, you have this political spat and platform inconsistency going on (where the imparted meaning of someone’s text might reasonably change based on how the Unicode characters are portrayed) where it’s not at all clear to me that anyone ever had a particular desire to embed a pistol in text in the first place, be it a water gun or semiautomatic pistol or revolver or whatever.
I’ve seen people arguing about the skin color of characters in various emojis. In text, I can just say “sad person” without attaching addition information, but if I have a visual representation, then I have to choose things like the skin color.
It just seems like room for friction that doesn’t really need to exist.
Oh, and another point — one of the things that initially seemed to me like a great application for Unicode emojis is flags, because in theory, those are designed to let one identify a country at a distance, and often people look at lists of countries. But…there are actually a lot of flags that look really similar to each other or are even identical, like the flag of Romania (U+1F1F7, U+1F1F4: 🇷🇴) and the flag of Chad (U+1F1F9, U+1F1E9: 🇹🇩). I remember some Romanians a bit back poking fun at some Romanian politician who had inadvertently used the Chad flag in some important post on social media. I’d imagine that it’s more-obnoxious if someone decides to do it in, say, a menu for country location. Like, in most cases, I think that it’s probably preferable to use the ISO country codes than flag emojis if you really need a short form, or to just write out the name of the country fully.
One minor thing that I am not super enthusiastic about when it comes to emojis is that they are typically colored. This has two drawbacks:
In a number of environments, it’s possible to set text color. This is only really practical because most characters are not colored, so the color can be variable. If we start introducing colored characters in general, that stops working. It also has at least the potential to create issues for colorblind users (though we could potentially also create workarounds).
It means that onscreen text may not be practical to present well in a monochrome environment, like a monochrome e-ink display or printed on paper. Traditionally, if you can see text onscreen, you can print it and it’s still legible on a monochrome printer. But, for example, there’s U+1FA75, LIGHT BLUE HEART: 🩵, and U+1FA77, PINK HEART: 🩷. Most non-sight-impaired users can probably distinguish between the two on a color display, but I suspect that a situation where one was using it to write text — maybe using blue to indicate male and pink to indicate female or something like that — wouldn’t be very easy to distinguish after being printed on a monochrome printer.
Both of these are kind of minor complaints. In practice, I just don’t see a whole lot of emoji use, and haven’t run into practical issues. But I do think that if we wanted to adopt a writing system that incorporated color, I’d probably favor a more-considered approach than just throwing whatever someone happens to propose in.
One other minor issue is that some emojis have political or social weight that get people upset. For example, you have U+1F52B, PISTOL.
Some people felt that people shouldn’t be able to portray an actual pistol, so changed the thing to a water pistol. I personally think that the whole debate is kind of absurd, because one can just write “pistol”, but it clearly has been a topic of political infighting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pistol_emoji
Based on the above, it looks like Elon Musk moved things back to being a classic American handgun.
But, point is, you have this political spat and platform inconsistency going on (where the imparted meaning of someone’s text might reasonably change based on how the Unicode characters are portrayed) where it’s not at all clear to me that anyone ever had a particular desire to embed a pistol in text in the first place, be it a water gun or semiautomatic pistol or revolver or whatever.
I’ve seen people arguing about the skin color of characters in various emojis. In text, I can just say “sad person” without attaching addition information, but if I have a visual representation, then I have to choose things like the skin color.
It just seems like room for friction that doesn’t really need to exist.
Oh, and another point — one of the things that initially seemed to me like a great application for Unicode emojis is flags, because in theory, those are designed to let one identify a country at a distance, and often people look at lists of countries. But…there are actually a lot of flags that look really similar to each other or are even identical, like the flag of Romania (U+1F1F7, U+1F1F4: 🇷🇴) and the flag of Chad (U+1F1F9, U+1F1E9: 🇹🇩). I remember some Romanians a bit back poking fun at some Romanian politician who had inadvertently used the Chad flag in some important post on social media. I’d imagine that it’s more-obnoxious if someone decides to do it in, say, a menu for country location. Like, in most cases, I think that it’s probably preferable to use the ISO country codes than flag emojis if you really need a short form, or to just write out the name of the country fully.