Even more specifically, emoji paved the way for proper support of Unicode characters from beyond the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).<p>There are 16 of these planes. This first block of 65,536 characters is what you can encode with only two bytes (e.g. UTF-16), and it includes most of what anyone alive needs to encode their languages adequately enough. For a long while anything encoded beyond this block had only limited support, and plenty of bugs and limitations meant that using it was tricky (well, it worked fine in LaTeX of course; via xelatex for example). This was back in 2008/2009.<p>Characters encoded beyond the BMP in plane 1 and 2 included things like esoteric CJKV additions (East Asian ideographs) not usually in daily use, but part of historic documents.<p>Then came the emoji additions (a core set is part of the BMP and came from Japanese telecom standards), and support is now ubiquitous. Using UTF-8 is a no-brainer for most applications, and a good things that is too!
An entertaining article, but it's not historically accurate. If you look at measured usage, UTF-8 took off around 2005 and was the dominant web encoding by 2008. Emojis weren't added to Unicode until 2010, at which point UTF-8 usage continued to increase at exactly the same rate as before.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#/media/File:Utf8webgrowth.svg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#/media/File:Utf8webgrowt...</a>
The ascendency of the CJK market, followed by Google Chrome, paved the way for UTF-8 everywhere.<p>The more interesting thing is why basically no one uses Eastern ideograms in the West, except maybe the Korean ideogram for crying (ㅠㅠ) and rarely, other kaomoji-like stuff. Some kanji also tell visual stories, and most children learn them just fine, so it’s not as simple as accessibility. Borrowing kanji was also anticipated by many sci fi writers and yet is not to be.
I am 100% convinced, tangentially, that mobile OS point releases use emoji as user bait to have a stronger guarantee of regular security updates.<p>"update now to get access to :burrito: and :taco:! (also fix the following 12 CVEs that 90% of our userbase doesn't know about or read)"
In russian segment of internet, various cyrillic encodings (win, dos, mac, koi-8) were a huge problem, and only UTF-8 finally solved it long before emojis became a thing.<p>It is known that developers from English-speaking countries are generally oblivious to encoding problems. Probably they could get by on ASCII far longer than the rest of the world, so no wonder that they might confuse cause and effect in this case.
Can confirm, at least anecdotally. As someone who runs a website but doesn't have nearly enough time to do everything he wants to do, upgrading to UTF-8 (and specifically utf8mb4) was never a priority - until my users starting using emojis and breaking things left, right and center.
Emoji probably contributed to widespread support of supplemental planes (fixing systems which treated UTF-16 as UCS-2), but I doubt they contributed much to UTF-8's popularity.
Yes. We shouldn't dismiss the weight of non-technical people voting with their dollars.<p>They may not care about i18n, but they do care about cute emoticons.<p>So we get not just unicode support everywhere, but also character pickers inside the keyboard.<p>And now we also get to benefit from unicode for things we find pretty - for example, the famous powerline <a href="https://github.com/powerline/powerline" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/powerline/powerline</a><p>Information density matters, and I can't wait for someone to replace "old" color coding of files (.dircolors in batch) by 1 emoticon : a music note for music files, etc.
It's interesting to watch the evolution of written language in action. I expect in 20 years we will routinely see emojis in written English novels and news articles. In 50 years we'll see them in textbooks and scientific journal articles.
"And it's amusing to see Apple using new emojis as a carrot to get people to install the latest security patches."<p>OMG, that makes so much sense. I was the opposite, grumbling about not caring about that silliness, not realizing the psychology of things.<p>Having suffered through the dark ages with Microsoft increasingly ruining the world with an endless stream of proprietary crap (I still hate them for making people think tab width is configurable), it's amazing to step back and witness how much things have improved (on this narrow slice).
Emojis are what caused me to learn about unicode personally. We had a big bloated library handling emoji stuff for us in our product [0]. Then one day, someone said that they wanted the comment threads to behave more like Slack - that if only an emoji was typed in a comment (without any additional text), it should appear big, otherwise it should be small. This required detecting when text was only an emoji which required me to learn how the heck this stuff actually worked. Great experience and I'm forever indebted to emojis.<p>0: <a href="https://kitemaker.co" rel="nofollow">https://kitemaker.co</a>, an awesome new issue tracker with tons of hotkeys (and emojis)
What I don't like about this approach is that everybody potentially sees different versions of the emoji.<p>(And by the way, HN stripped out the emoji I put in this comment; perhaps that is for the better, but it's kind of funny that the software we use here is quite opposite to the software we make in our day jobs)
Do e-mail clients like Thunderbird and Outlook already use UTF-8 by default? The last time I checked they used ANSI/ISO codepages for new E-mails. I mean the desktop MS Office Outlook app primarily, but I'm curious about the web apps as well.
didn't seem like it was emojis paving the path but web-based email and internationalization of websites. Just the whole move to web in various key areas like email meant it became just less of a hair-pulling nightmare for developers to have to deal with encoding between countries and platforms. Throw in the dawn of smartphones (and emojis came along with that yes) and that was more problems on top of that, people moving between desktop/mobile/web etc. UTF-8 took care of alot of the headache.
Pretty sure the dominance of ASCII on the internet and the efficieny/compatability of UTF-8 in relation to ASCII paved the way for UTF-8 everywhere. It is the standard unicode encoding of the internet.<p>If anything, I would say the UTF-8 paved the way for emojis, not the other way around as the ubiquity of a unicode encoding allowed for the existence of emojis. Can't encode emojies with ASCII. You have to have unicode and its encoding first before you can have emojis.