emoji (was Re: I-D Action: draft-klensin-idna-rfc5891bis-00.txt)

[Shawn Steele]

>  I suspect that, if you tell some "users" (i.e. purchasers) of such names that the names turn out to be unpredictable in their behaviour, 

How is I♥NY unpredictable?  The only unpredictability there is that it was removed in IDNA2008, and that because of that, most browsers continue to support it - yet a few (rare) places choose to not support it.

> these are especially bad analogies _precisely_ because they are well-developed writing systems where the distinction between "competent reader and writer of the language" and "incompetent reader or writer of the language" is reasonably apparent to other competent language users.  

People make transcription errors of 0 and O all the time for email and domain names.  Sure, those are typically not the straightforward "google" type names, but they happen.  (to me even, I chose poorly for l3-g0.com, especially since I pronounce his last name as "oh").

And in Chinese I've seen lots of ambiguity.  Maybe not as bad as emoji, but there are many potential good labels that cannot be guaranteed to have 100% transcription accuracy even between native writers/readers.  (Presumably marketing folks would take some of that into account when choosing domains in those markets).

> The same is simply not true of emojis, partly because the context for their use is _exactly_ the sort of informal uses where ambiguity and imprecision is less important.  Even rendering is largely undefined.  Indeed, http://emojipedia.org/pile-of-poo/ shows that at least one vendor doesn't put a happy face on the pile of poo:
is that a different emoji or isn't it?  Those distinctions are what make emojis perfectly fine for personal communications and really bad for identifiers.
 
Yes, but a strict identifier isn't always required.  The hypothetical I♥NY.com could easily redirect to "iloveny.com" or something.  It is a sufficient identifier to use in a link in other marketing/advertising.

But I think I addressed that backwards.  The ambiguity of a pile of poo or a smiling pile of poo isn't much different many other labels.  Aaa.com did not used to go to the auto club.  Napa.com will not take me to the auto parts store or travel information about wineries.  Frontier.com gets me my ISP but won't help me with my plane tickets.  Your pile of poo might be more precise than any of those.

-Shawn