Comment by account42
5 months ago
Emoticons are not the same as emojis. For one they allow for more expression or personal style by having different variants, e.g. :-) vs :) or for absolute maniacs: (:
They are also not limited to what some consortium and a couple of megacorporations think you should be able to express.
> or for absolute maniacs: (:
To be fair, Unicode allows for that variant too: https://emojipedia.org/upside-down-face
Agreed, but Unicode allows me to express the emotion that I most commonly feel when working in the IT industry: disapproval.
Yes and that's still an emoticon made from creative use of pre-existing characters rather than an emoji specified in Unicode.
They also lack semantics. There are downsides as well as up.
Usage rather than specifications determine semantics and due to the points in my previous post those often disagree for Unicode emojis.
I'm glad you recognise the value of usage when it comes to emoticons vs. emoji...
Emojis also severely lack semantics. They are specified in terms of what they should visually depict, not what they are supposed to mean.
emoji lack clear semantics too, consider the eggplant.
I think there's a difference. The code point will always mean "eggplant", it just happens that the concept can be interpreted in different ways according to context—just like the word itself. But ":-)" can only ever mean "colon minus rparens" before further interpretation.
2 replies →