So much work just to take away people's choice to name their reading lists anything they want. Considering they even mention the database needing to be involved way more than it should be, maybe they should rethink this.
A minor correction:<p>> Let's say we want to display the emoji for a brown man, “<brown man>”. There isn't a code point for that. Instead we use “<man> ZWJ <brown>”.<p>(with the emoji replaced, as I expect HN would strip them).<p>That's inaccurate: skin tone modifiers are used directly after a base emoji character, <i>without</i> a zero-width joiner in between.
But why? You even asked at the very beginning "I shouldn't accept just anything, right?" But why not? Like what is going to happen if someone uses a "non emoji?" Nothing. Nothing will happen. Well now you will tell at the person and tell them to use an emoji. But if you just accepted everything, it would just work. It would save you time and your users grief.
My main question here is, how future proof is this?
This is one of the cases where they've spent so long trying to solve.... a problem which wasn't a problem in the first place. Just let users tag the content with any character they want, and maybe limit it to 1 or 2 characters. Way simpler and way more user-friendly than trying to limit it to emojis.
Given the mention of both Emoji and Dewey Decimal, worth mentioning Librarything introduced Dewmoji a few years back:<p><a href="https://blog.librarything.com/2016/07/introducing-dewmojis/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://blog.librarything.com/2016/07/introducing-dewmojis/</a><p>A mapping of emoji to different Dewey Decimal Classes e.g. 7 : Arts and Leisure : <a href="https://emojipedia.org/artist-palette/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://emojipedia.org/artist-palette/</a>
I ended just comparing against a map of emoji strings.<p><a href="https://github.com/makew0rld/go-isemoji">https://github.com/makew0rld/go-isemoji</a>
> Its job is “when a mommy code point loves a daddy code point very much, they come together and make a whole new glyph”.<p>Can't stand this style of writing. But it's just me.