How did the Unicode Consortium turn around. I remember 10 years ago they were refusing to add standard media icons because

>The scope of the Unicode Standard (and ISO/IEC 10646) does not extend to encoding every symbol or sign that bears meaning in the world.

>This list has been round and round and round on this -- regular as clockwork, about once a year, the topic comes up again. And I see no indication that the UTC or WG2 are any closer to concluding that bunches of icons should start being included in the character encoding standards simply on the basis of their being widespread and recognizable icons.

>Where is the defensible line between "Fast Forward" and "Women's Restroom" or "Right Lane Merge Ahead" or "Danger Crocodiles No Swimming"?

(http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2005-m08/0371.h...)

Now it looks they add whatever somebody thinks of. I guess it's related to the liberation from the BMP.

Let’s start working on "SVG over UTF" RFC, should we?

Honestly, I think "SVG over UTF" makes a lot more sense. It's impossible to make a character set that supports every character known to man, because that just adds undue effort on every computer maker, ect, to keep up.

So why don't we pick a very good set: perhaps every letter in every language in common use for the past 200 years? Then, for the oddball symbols that someone wants to mix in text, there can be some kind of SVG-like convention. This allows publishing textual information without requiring that every device maker updates their device to support a 1-off symbol.

Because it's easier to throw in random icons than to actually accomplish the goal of "every letter in every language in common use for the past 200 years", or even "past 20 years".

Or, put another way:

'We have an unambiguous, cross-platform way to represent “PILE OF POO” (), while we’re still debating which of the 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers deserve to spell their own names correctly.'

https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of...