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

Shawn Steele Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com
Mon Mar 13 07:57:16 CET 2017


That's a confusability problem.  Not an unpredictability problem.  The machine's always going to go to the same place for the same codepoints.

I did not ignore the Unicode categories of Emoji.  I indicated that despite their classification, Unicode (not me) has been including new emoji characters in their updated tables.  The 2003 emoji did not surprise me, but I was surprised that they were extending it.

I♥NY is far less confusing (to me) than most any CJK name.  I still might click on a CJK name if I'm looking for tours in China and some ad pops up with a CJK URL.  I totally get that I wouldn't want my bank to use emoji, and I'm not going to trust those links that I click very far, but the danger from me clicking a random I♥NY is no worse than me clicking "iloveny.com".  I know where neither of those go.  Both could have malware or phishing.  First, I would have to "know" that it was a well-known name, enough to somehow want to trust it.  And I could maybe still be tricked by ILuvNY.com or iloveny.info or something.

Certainly if it is a site that I "need" to access, like my bank, I'm going to insist on a URL that I can type.  Heck, I'd even need I♥NY to have a friendly iloveny form.  Since I can use and trust (so to speak) the iloveny form, then it doesn't matter if they have a vanity form with emoji in some cases.

I understand your position, I just happen to disagree with it 😊

-Shawn


-----Original Message-----
From: Patrik Fältström [mailto:paf at frobbit.se] 
Sent: Sunday, March 12, 2017 7:18 PM
To: Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele at microsoft.com>
Cc: Andrew Sullivan <ajs at anvilwalrusden.com>; idna-update at alvestrand.no
Subject: Re: emoji (was Re: I-D Action: draft-klensin-idna-rfc5891bis-00.txt)

On 13 Mar 2017, at 0:07, Shawn Steele wrote:

> How is I♥NY unpredictable?

Simply because you do not know in the general case which one of the emojis, with or without modifiers, are in use there. The number of similar emojis are bad enough but on top of that you have modifiers (as combining characters) that together create a confusability and instability risk for the end user.

This on top of the problem with, as you explicitly ignore, the fact that the Unicode Consortium declared the emoji characters themselves not be of the categories that fall into the general extension of the classic  L-D-H specification.

   Patrik


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