One of the major goals of Unicode was to support round trip conversion from all the widely-used character sets into Unicode, and then back out again. In particular, supporting popular Japanese character sets was important for technical and commercial reasons.
There was a lot of weird stuff in the world's character sets.
Emoji were first used by Japanese cell phone carriers. They were encoded as Shift JIS characters, but in incompatible ways. The Unicode Consortium had no real interest in this until Google and Apple basically said, "If we're going to have to support all these character sets, could we please standardize them?"
I think it's just the reality of standardizing the world's character sets. A lot of weird legacy stuff will slip in, and other countries will want to standardize things that seem unnecessary. Personally, I'm very thankful that somebody wants to do all the exhausting political work of coming to a consensus. A few snowmen are small price to pay.
There was a lot of weird stuff in the world's character sets.
Emoji were first used by Japanese cell phone carriers. They were encoded as Shift JIS characters, but in incompatible ways. The Unicode Consortium had no real interest in this until Google and Apple basically said, "If we're going to have to support all these character sets, could we please standardize them?"
I think it's just the reality of standardizing the world's character sets. A lot of weird legacy stuff will slip in, and other countries will want to standardize things that seem unnecessary. Personally, I'm very thankful that somebody wants to do all the exhausting political work of coming to a consensus. A few snowmen are small price to pay.