- From: Masayasu Ishikawa <mimasa@w3.org>
- Date: Sat, 13 Jul 2002 17:17:50 +0900 (JST)
- To: shanx@shanx.com, inekemaa@xs4all.nl
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
"Shashank Tripathi" <shanx@shanx.com> wrote: > | How can I make the so called emojis accessible? And how > | to change their default colours when I don't want to use > | the font-element and CSS can not be used? > > Again, I don't know what you mean by making emojis > (http://snipurl.com/imode_emojis) accessible? Actually so-called emojis are one of the most tricky part of i-mode which could make i-mode-optimized sites inaccessible outside i-mode, not just accessibility context. > I am sure you know how to use emojis, but this > is an example: > > <a href="login.htm">諒</a> > > This will show up on a phone screen as a key icon, with a link to > login.htm. Is that "accessible" given that it is a key icon (indicating > some sort of lock, i.e., security/login) and is clickable to take user > to login.htm? It would only work on i-mode phones in Japan, and I guess it won't work on i-mode phones in Germany, the Netherlands and Taiwan, let alone all the other platforms. The most serious design mistake i-mode made, IMHO, is that it defined Shift_JIS as the only supported character encoding (which is OK) but used it as if it is the document character set (i.e. 諒 represents that code point in Shift_JIS encoding), which is completely wrong. The document character set of HTML is the Universal Character Set, a.k.a, UCS, regardless of character encoding schemes, thus a numeric charecter reference always refers to a code point in UCS. So, 諒 would be redered as a key icon in i-mode phones in Japan, but 諒 in UCS is a CJK compatibility ideograph which has nothing to do with a key icon, and that would cause serious interoperatibily problem. It seems NTT DoCoMo finally recognized this problem as they plan to deploy i-mode service outside Japan - Shift_JIS is not a de facto standard character encoding outside Japan. For example, they chose windows-1252 as the character encoding for i-mode service in Europe. So they have changed emoji assignments, mapped them into Private Use Area (PUA) of UCS. Thus, in the latest i-mode spec, a key icon is  (U+E6D9), and old Shift_JIS numbers are deprecated. I guess that would work on i-mode phones outside Japan and also on the brand-new 504i series i-mode phones in Japan, but still, it won't work on other platforms as there's no guarantee for interoperability if you use PUA. After all, PUA is only for _private use_. My personal recommendation is "don't use emojis", if you care for interoperability. Regards, -- Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org W3C - World Wide Web Consortium
Received on Saturday, 13 July 2002 04:17:53 UTC