I am asked to repeat comments I have made on this document on the last-call list.
1. Personal comment: Cultural or technical experiment
The document must make it clear whether it is an experiment in technical solution to send simple well formed messages OR if it is a cultural experiment whether people do agree all over the planet what "thumbs up" means.
We already know that differences in culture and norm do vary over the planet, specifically when body parts are involved.
I would personally because of this rather see a signalling mechanism of "agree" or "disagree" or whatever, and then a mapping from these signals to emojis or otherwise indications that can be displayed in the email client or similar.
But, if the document will be about "sending emojis" it must be very very clear that IETF do understand that the meaning of emojis is definitely not the same in different cultures and the conclusion from sending an emoji might surprise people. A lot. Not worse than on social media, but we all know how bad that is.
2. As liaison from IETF to Unicode Consortium
I see the document do specify emoji sequences to make it possible to send such things.
emoji = emoji_sequence
emoji_sequence = { defined in [Emoji-Seq] }
I am strongly objecting to allow any emoji sequences without having a very well defined rule what what they are. This description above is in an EBNF and the spec references is definitely not that clear.
We also do know (see for example SAC-095) how problematic sequences of emoji are and we have definitely not a stable definition of emoji sequences yet.
I.e. I object to allow emoji sequences in this document unless it can be proven the definition is to the same level of clarity as an ABNF (i.e. copied an really included in this specification, just like the "base emoji"). While at the same time saying the field itself is not only one Unicode Code Point but can be more than one.
To summarise, let me say explicitly I do like the document, that it should be published, but, the dangers and dragons within it are still pretty large. Very large. And they have teeth.
Patrik
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