Video Ristretto: Katie McLaughlin - The Power ⚡️ and Responsibility ? of Unicode Adoption - Web Directions

Video Ristretto: Katie McLaughlin – The Power ⚡️ and Responsibility ? of Unicode Adoption

John Allsopp 14th September, 2016 @johnallsopp

Communication is difficult. Whether it’s between humans or machines or a combination of the two, trying to translate meaningful information is a lossy process.

Converting programming languages to use the new Unicode standard is hard, but once it’s in place, you get this marvellous feature-add: Emoji compatibility. No longer do we have to make faces with symbols, or be forced to platform-specific emoticons! Rejoice in the extended character set!

At this year’s Code conference, Operations Engineer Katie McLaughlin took us through the rich (albeit brief, as yet) history of emoji, how they have been adopted and adapted to various platforms and how they reached their current peak of popularity. From the technical to the social aspects, mojibake and UTF-8, this talk will cover why the extended character set provided by the Unicode standard needs to be treated with responsibility by users and platforms alike.

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Thoroughly enjoyed Web Directions — met some great people, heard some inspiring presenters and added a whole bunch of things to my to-do list.

Joel Roberts Web Developer

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