You don't have to point to human history, though that's a good source of missing scripts. Waving off scripts actually in use as "increasingly obscure", while cheering Unicode throwing in any icon random geeks pitch to them, misses the purpose of Unicode.
You're tossing that assertion around without supporting it – what commonly used characters are not in Unicode? How many people use them? Are they not in Unicode because nobody cares or because there is a lack of someone authoritative helping codify the list or contentious disagreements about some aspects of that work?
Seriously, you're able to Google up those other links, but you somehow can't find the (non-exhaustive) Unsupported Scripts list or the Proposed New Scripts pages on the Unicode site? And, without knowing the situation for any of them, you're going to throw out excuses for why the absences don't matter?
These aren't characters, but entire scripts that are not part of the standard. Nor are major scripts like kanji complete.
Again, you're the one making the claim. Can you precisely state what you believe to be the problem and cite some sources that this is a major problem and that nobody is working on it?
More importantly, ask why it seems unreasonable that a small number of very widely-used ISO standard symbols were incorporated quickly? Wouldn't that be the most reasonable expectation since it lacks the political heat of e.g. Han unification and doesn't require any research or debate to establish that they are used, have a precise meaning, and are not covered by existing codepoints?
I've already stated my complaint: that getting gratuitous icons into Unicode is easier than actual scripts for human languages. Since you're having Google issues, I'll link you to a page I already mentioned, which it self links to other relevant pages http://unicode.org/standard/unsupported.html
I love the echoing nature of these counter-arguments, that a problem doesn't even exist unless it's "major" and "nobody is working on it". I wonder how many actual different human beings have responded to me in this thread...
You might find your conversations work better if you respond to what people are actually saying rather than repeating yourself or assuming that other people don't know how to use Google, particularly after they've already sent you links which comprehensively disprove your assertion by demonstrating how many new characters are being added and that emoji constitute less than 1% of the 7,500 new characters in Unicode 9.0.
Your original claim was that “Unicode don't actually have anything like coverage of the entirety of every script and alphabet” but you're arguing about things which affect something like 0.008% of people – not even their primary usage – and for which there is work in progress to support!
Nobody is saying that Unicode is complete, but like any other human effort there's a limited amount of time to work on things. At some point things which are used daily by billions of people are going to get prioritized over things which are used infrequently by thousands of people, and it's hard to argue that this is wrong even if you – like me – want to have 100% of human language represented in Unicode.
"You might find your conversations work better if you respond to what people are actually saying rather than repeating yourself"
You're going to seriously say that after your last few posts? Two posts into this exchange, you moved the goalposts, and you hammered that button repeatedly.
But at least you actually looked at the proof you repeatedly demanded, even I had already mentioned the pages. You didn't bother reading much of it, or to note that goes well beyond a couple scripts on that page to other incomplete scripts and as-yet entirely unimplemented scripts. But you at least made that minimum effort.
And the limited time to work on these things is exactly the issue. There are scripts not yet in the standard and major language scripts that aren't complete - but we've got "pile of poo" and a slew of emoji. And now, we've got four power button icons that a handful of people demanded.
> You're going to seriously say that after your last few posts? Two posts into this exchange, you moved the goalposts, and you hammered that button repeatedly.
You started this conversation with “Unicode don't actually have anything like coverage of the entirety of every script and alphabet.” It's hardly moving the goalposts to question how complete Unicode has to be to qualify as “anything like” or how much weight usage should have.
> But at least you actually looked at the proof you repeatedly demanded, even I had already mentioned the pages. You didn't bother reading much of it, or to note that goes well beyond a couple scripts on that page to other incomplete scripts and as-yet entirely unimplemented scripts. But you at least made that minimum effort.
Before you could call that proof, you have to clearly articulate the questions it could answer. Note that my first comment indicated a clear understanding of how Unicode works – the process is not in question here, only the thresholds you haven't articulated. All I've been trying to get you to state is precisely what your rules would be for coverage of human languages before we can add anything else and how much usage should factor into that. There's also a much harder question of trying to come up with a rule which to say why a pictograph, the phaistos disc symbols, etc. are valid for inclusion but a modern symbol used millions of times a day around the world to communicate is not?
While thinking about this, it's also worth remembering that despite your apparent belief that emoji are a Western novelty, the question was how to improve Unicode adoption in Japan and that required having an answer for the millions of people who were using systems which relied on non-standard encodings and by most accounts Japanese carriers were resistant to adopting Unicode without having a standard to replace those ad-hoc systems. I think that decision should have been handled differently (i.e. assigning an emoji plane) but it was driven by understandable technical reasons affecting large numbers of people on a daily basis. Since that decision was made, the additional cost to add a small number of non-controversial additions which do not require scholarly research or documentation does not seem excessive — we are, after all, talking about a small percentage of the new symbols in Unicode 9.0.
