[At-Large] Opera now lets you ditch boring web links and use emojis instead

[bzs at theworld.com]

(Michele: Have you tried using punycode for that Irish char? Does it
work better?)

As to emojis I think I'll pushback on the characterization (ahem!) of
this as frivolous.

I used to communicate quite a bit with a friend who is Chinese, born
and raised in Beijing but quite fluent in English, went to university
in the states etc.

She would frequently start replying largely in emojis. Perhaps some of
it was just her being amusing but at times it became like solving
rebuses (rebi?)

Then it occurred to me that Chinese, being a logographic language, is
not that dissimilar to emojis which are ideographic and only arguably
logographic (her use seemed roughly logographic.)

The point being that perhaps to those of accustomed to phonographic
writing systems (Latin, Arabic, Korean, etc) emojis may seem more
removed from a writing system than to those who use logographic
systems like Chinese.

So there may be some emerging bridge there which us phonographicists
don't see -- new extensions to character sets just as valid as our
writing systems descending from early Semitic writing systems &c.

At any rate we should endeavor to at least clear the path for such
evolution rather than trying to judge its value.

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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