There are idiograms used by only a few hundred people, and some that are no longer used except in academic circles included in Unicode. Why would you not include idiograms that are currently in use by millions if not billions of people?
That might be true for the heart, emoticons and several others, but I'm not sure if that statement applies to the taco.
Where does it end? Very curious how it's determined when something is worthy of inclusion. At what point is unicode no longer an appropriate place to store graphics?
Where are you located? I'm in the south western US and it's extremely clear that that taco is not going away anytime soon. And idiograms in the Unicode set do not have to be universal to be included, e.g. CJK chars are not used in the western hemisphere.
Only if it goes through the relevant processes. Look at the nightmare they have around racial and gender lines with some of the human characters. Had it gone through better, then it wouldn't have been a problem.
Frankly, I'd like to know the names of the people in these ad hoc committees who approve changes to such an important standard. They need to be made accountable.
The Industry determines what is worthy of inclusion in this Industry Standard. If you want to interoperate with Facebook, you need all the Facebook codes. If you want to interoperate with Line, you need all the Line codes, and Wechat, WhatsApp, Ebay, Alibaba and even Github. You want a Taco code point because the data you are being fed contains Tacos, and you want to know it is a Taco rather than a USER_CODEPOINT+XXXXX. And if you don't care about Tacos, you can ignore it because you know it is a Taco and not something important or corruption. And you can just pass it on down the line to some other process that does care about Tacos.
I'd argue that emoji are going to be culturally short lived and don't record information in the same way that language characters do. It would be better to move them into a separate standard.
Why do you think they'll be short lived? Emoji can be more expressive than pure text, and they have a tendency to take on a meaning that can't quite be described in words. For example, a quick thumbs-up is a great way to show you acknowledged something.
A few basic emoticons - fine. But like a third of emojis are only legible if you know their name (under the particular program you're using, and most of the icons in popular applications are simply ugly; that's a topic for another rant though). I can understand FACE WITH TEARS OF JOY when I see it, but INFORMATION DESK PERSON, TYPE-4? Is this going to be useful 20 years from now? And then you have stuff like FACE WITH LOOK OF TRIUMPH where the picture has little resemblance to the official meaning, which leads one to wonder what your interlocutor meant and how is this icon displayed on their machine.
