On 1/17/2021 2:09 AM, Nick Hilliard wrote:
o Does the presence of the Reaction capability create any
operational problems for recipients?
Broadly speaking, yes: this draft is about expressing meaning using
cultural tokens but it's inherently rooted in a specific cultural
background from a specific time period, which means that it's a
product of the culture you're in, and relevant to the current time
period. These parameters will change according to time and geography,
rendering your proposal obsolete or worse.
Emojis are not interpreted the same way universally, e.g. there are
significant cultural differences in how a thumbs-up emoji might be
perceived in different parts of the world. Although you haven't
specified it in the draft, this is all the more so for the "OK" hand
gesture, which was fine even 20 years ago in "western" culture, but
not so much these days. Zooming back in time, how would things look
now if we had had this draft in the 1990s (let's pretend we had utf8 +
widespread emojis then) and there were replies all over the place with
the OK hand gesture? This wouldn't have matured well.
IOW, there is merit to what you're suggesting here, but if you want to
make this draft more relevant in the longer term to a wider cultural
audience, then either:
1. open it up - to all UTF8 tokens, allowing users to make their own
choices about what reaction would be culturally appropriate to them at
that period in time.
2. restrict it - by abstracting the representation to better-defined
universal tokens, e.g. "happy" / "affirmative-reply", which might be
interpreted today in the US as <smiley-face> / <thumbs-up>, but which
could be reimagined in other cultures in other time periods.
Nick,
This is one of those cases that distinguish theory from practice. There
can't be any argument against your observation that cultures differ in
their communication styles and symbols. If we knew how to do tools that
were infinitely adaptable to those differences -- while also being
substantial and helpful -- that would be excellent. But the nature of
doing Internet standards for user-level capabilities typically requires
doing things that are constrained -- and, by some views, biased.
Earlier during development of this specification, there was in fact some
consideration to having the 'value' part of the construct take
essentially anything, not just emojis. The problem is that it
essentially dilutes the utility of the field and certainly eliminates
any predictability to its content. Besides, if the user wants to add
more than an emoji, they are free to put that in the regular part (rest)
of the body.
Emojis have quite a bit of established practice, and especially for
social networks. The current specification is seeking to leverage
established practice, rather than invent a broader, more flexible range
of uses or meanings.
Allowing the full set of Unicode emojis is actually quite flexible,
relatively to established practice, for some social networking
services. The base-emojis rule is intended to demonstrate of example of
an established and limited repertoire. To the extent that there are
groups wanting a different, common set, they can define it.
d/
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Dave Crocker
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Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
American Red Cross
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