Update on emoji4unicode

By Kat Momoi, Software Engineer and Emoji Encoding Project member & Takeshi Kishimoto, Gmail Product Manager

Last November Markus Scherer wrote about Google's efforts to encode Emoji (絵文字), or "picture characters," the graphical versions of :-) and its friends, and about the creation of the open source project emoji4unicode. Based on the feedback to the project from a variety of people, we have updated and refined the list of Emoji characters that need to be encoded as new characters in an upcoming version of the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. The final list reflects all known Emoji characters used by the 3 major mobile phone companies in Japan (NTT docomo, KDDI/AU and SoftBank Mobile), excluding the ones that already are encoded in the current Unicode Standard.

The Unicode Standard and ISO 10646 are synchronized in terms of character content, and jointly controlled by the Unicode Consortium and the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 committee. Google and Apple jointly submitted The Emoji Encoding Proposal to the Unicode Consortium and it was formally approved by the Unicode Technical Committee on February 6, 2009. Now this proposal goes to ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 for deliberations and approval as a joint contribution to ISO by the Unicode Consortium and the US national body. The approval by the Unicode Consortium is thus a major milestone toward getting the characters into Unicode. The next SC2/WG2 meeting takes place in late April, 2009 in Dublin, Ireland and the Emoji proposal will be discussed there. We encourage you to read a copy of the proposal submitted to SC2/WG2.

Since we wrote the first blog post on this topic, we have received positive feedback for this proposal. We are both surprised and gratified to learn that there are so many people with a strong interest in Emoji, and we believe that further support from the community will greatly aid in advancing the cause of the Emoji Encoding project.

W3C Forms Working Group Convenes at the Googleplex

Post by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist


I have been a member of the W3C Forms Working Group since its inception in early 2000, and it gave me great pleasure to be able to host the group's recent three day face to face meeting on the Google campus February 9th - 11th. This Working Group develops an XML vocabulary that is used for creating forms-based Web interaction. During our meeting, the group spent its time finishing up the test suite for its current suite of specifications. A significant portion of the meeting was devoted to designing the necessary APIs for implementing the Forms technology within current-day browsers via pluggable JavaScript. Implementing the Forms technology in a cross-browser fashion using open JavaScript libraries holds the promise of delivering cross-browser, cross-platform Web interaction that is authored almost exclusively via declarative markup, which helps authors create Web interaction without having to program. In addition to myself , meeting participants included:

• John Boyer, Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM and current chair of the W3C Forms Working Group
• Erik Bruchez, developer of Orbeon Forms , an XForms-based open source forms solution
• Leigh Klotz, software architect for Xerox Corporation
• Ulrich Nicolas Lissé, XML Technologist and Standards Architect at DreamLab Technologies
• Steven Pemberton, from CWI, an institute for research in mathematics and computer science
• Nick Van den Bleeken, Research & Development Manager at Inventive Designers, a document and intelligent eForms automation solutions provider
• Charlie Wiecha, Manager of Multichannel Web Interaction at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center

A breakdown of the agenda is available.

Emoji for Unicode: Open Source Data for the Encoding Proposal

By Markus Scherer, Google Internationalization Engineering

Emoji (絵文字), or "picture characters", the graphical versions of :-) and its friends, are widely used and especially popular among Japanese cell phone users. Just last month, they became available in Gmail ― see the team's announcement: A picture is worth a thousand words.


These symbols are encoded as custom (carrier-specific) symbol characters and sent as part of text messages, emails, and web pages. In theory, they are confined to each cell phone carrier's network unless there is an agreement and a converter in place between two carriers. In practice, however, people expect emoji just to work - what they put into a message will get to all the recipients; what they see on a web page will be seen by others; if they search for a character they'll find it. For that to really work well, these symbol characters need to be part of the Unicode Standard (the universal character set used in modern computing).

There are active, on-going efforts to standardize a complete set of emoji as regular symbols characters in Unicode. This involves determining which symbols are already covered in Unicode, and which new symbols would be needed. We're trying to help this effort along by sharing all of our mapping data and tools in the form of the "emoji4unicode" open source project. The goal is more effective collaboration with other members of the Unicode Consortium and review by the cell phone carriers and other interested parties. By making these tools and mappings available, we hope to assist and accelerate the encoding process. Take a look at the documentation, browse the data and tools and let us know what you think.

C++ Standards Meeting Finalizes Feature-Complete Draft Standard

By Matt Austern and Lawrence Crowl, Google

In late September, Google hosted the 44th meeting of the ISO C++ Standards Committee in San Francisco, California. Approximately 50 members from seven countries met six days non-stop to nail down details of the new standard.

The new standard, "C++0x", will be a major upgrade to the language—the first major upgrade since C++ first became an International Standard in 1998. It will include support for concurrent programming, better abstraction power and efficiency, simpler programming, enhanced functional programming, upgraded generic programming, optional garbage collection, significant new library components (including TR1), and many other additions and cleanups. C++0x will still be recognizably the same language as today's C++, and it will be almost 100% compatible, but working programmers will find the new standard a much improved tool for serious application development.

All of the features in C++0x have been on the table for years, but this meeting was the one when the committee finally voted to commit to them. Among the long-awaited features added at this meeting were user-defined literals, symbol attributes, simplified iteration with Python-like for loops, library thread safety, and improved generic programming with "concepts".

This was an unusually busy meeting, and it achieved a major milestone: this is the meeting where the committee voted to advance the draft standard to Committee Draft. Or, in less bureaucratic language, we've shipped our beta. The language is now feature complete. The committee will still fix some bugs before the final version is officially released in 2010, and some features might get tweaked or even dropped, but you shouldn't expect major changes. Interested programmers can try the partial g++ implementation.

Google Sponsors Freedom Training Task Force

Shane Coughlan, FTF Coordinator, Free Software Foundation Europe

My name's Shane Coughlan and I'm a coordinator at Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), the European sister of the United States based Free Software Foundation. The FSFE is involved in a whole range of activities, ranging from organizing grassroots meetings to representing the case for software freedom before the World Intellectual Property Organization and the Internet Governance Forum.

I manage the Freedom Task Force, a project inside the FSFE that provides Free Software licence education, training and consultancy. Among other activities, the FTF manages a pan-European network of legal experts and works extensively with gpl-violations.org to resolve licensing issues. In a nutshell, it's our job to build infrastructure that encourages free software adoption and fair use.

Recently Google made a contribution to help us deliver training courses, attend conferences and translate documentation into more languages. Like all NGOs we have limited resources and Google's assistance makes a significant difference. I'd like to thank the Open Source Programs Office for believing in what we do and for making it possible for us to continue this work.

If you would like to learn more about the FTF please drop us a line or visit our website. You can also keep an eye open for me at conferences. I'm always glad to have a chat and, catering tent permitting, a coffee with chocolate biscuits.