emojis everywhere, seeking understanding / clarity / opinion

[Wm]

On 07/04/2018 19:50, Buddha Buck wrote:

[much snipped]

thanks to JohnR too, BB's message was more fun to reply to

> On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 2:12 AM Wm via gnucash-devel <
> gnucash-devel at gnucash.org> wrote:

> Perhaps, but I don't think it is GnuCash's place to dictate that.
> 
> Besides, until the time comes where I am audited, the government
> authorities do not need to see what I keep in my personal books. Even then,
> the IRS auditor may be slightly confused by my calling my Medicare
> withholdings "Expense:Taxes:NHS" 

NHS? omigosh maybe the USA will eventually be a developed nation :)

> and my Federal withholdings
> "Expenses:Taxes:Inland Revenue", but ultimately, she isn't going to care.
> If she is a nerd of the classics, she might ask why I have "Expenses:☤"
> instead of "Expenses:⚕", to which I'll answer "this is the US; the symbol
> of the God of Commerce is more appropriate than the symbol of healing,
> don't you think?".

A lovely answer.

>> and from a personal POV I just don't like them and think their use
>> inappropriate in a broad project like gnc that tries to be agnostic.
>>
> 
> GNC does try to be agnostic. Adhering to a broad standard like Unicode is
> *precisely* being agnostic. Catering to your personal POV is not agnostic.

Disagree, we can talk about which bit I disagree with later.

>> half for fun is this (.)(.) female breasts, an overweight man's chest or
>> a pair of eyes ?  We think we know when we use them and they're often
>> fine amongst friends ... but do they belong in an accounting application
>> as accounting is, usually, formal in one sense or another and often used
>> for communicating to people outside of our immediate social circle.
>>
> 
> The emoticon you gave is not an emoji, and is not standardized by the
> Unicode Consortium. It seems a non-sequitor to this discussion.

Now *that* I find confusing.

Y'see, JohnR suggested every emoji had a single meaning, representation, 
etc OR that it wasn't anything to do with us if, say, someone 
represented someone badly in their own accounts.

>> or to put it another way, do we want to be the accounting program that
>> allowed someone to use a picture of a turd for the inland revenue and
>> then used that in their tax return :)
>>
> 
> I think it is generally recommended that people use the output of GnuCash
> as a source of data for filling out Inland Revenue forms, as GnuCash can't
> generate tax forms itself. Besides, the mapping of personal accounting
> accounts to the data needed on the forms isn't necessarily easy. It may be
> important for your own accounting to have separate accounts for things
> which go onto form SA103F, line 22 (Repairs and Maintenance of Properties
> and Equipment), for instance.  So the fact that you keep track of the
> maintenance of the portable toilets on your jobsite as "Expenses:💩💩
> Cleanup" is immaterial; you aren't going to send that to HMRC.

I agree but are we dumbing down or not ?

>> [1] I accept, absolutely, that a nice smile face (I tend to stick to
>> text, myself) is pretty much universal these days; my argument is that
>> when you send me your emoji it doesn't necessarily appear the same to
>> both of us, mainly because there are a whole bunch of people owning [2]
>> these things.
>>
> 
> In general, I'm not sending you my accounts. So what does it matter?

Someone generally gets to know about money being moved about unless 
you're one of those off radar americans and just keeping accounts for 
whoever decides to poison you and your family next.

> Besides, the "whole bunch of people owning these things" quickly discovered
> that the issue you bring up is a problem, and they got together to
> standardize it to eliminate the problem. When you send an emoji to someone
> else, they don't necessarily get the exact same rendering of the emoji that
> you sent, but if you sent a "🧕", they should get an emoji representing a
> "woman with headscarf".

I was wondering about that because I'm not seeing "woman with headscarf".

JohnR said they should be the same for everyone but they aren't for me.

Do I need to belong to a club to see the same thing as other people when 
I receive "lady wearing long dress beating horse" or "man in top hat 
having gay sex with slave from 1980's reproduction of slave literature 
really cool in the southern US states now" ?

>> [2] since some emoji sets are proprietary, how does that fit in with gnc
>> as an open source accounting project ? <-- I'm not invoking Stallman
>> weirdness so much as practical stuff like: are we all seeing the same
>> thing?
>>
> 
> The "people owning these things" turned control over them to the Unicode
> Consortium, an international standards body.

Only up to a point, then they started doing it all themselves again. 
Well that's my reading

>> [4] did a dev look at that and think, "super idea, we *must* include
>> non-text chars in our text based xml file.  absolutely.  best idea ever
>> hashtag" or whatever the current parlance is.
>>
> 
> More likely a dev said "If we are an international project, then we must
> *absolutely* support internationalization and localization, and supporting
> Unicode text is part of that support.". I doubt that support for emojii in
> particular entered into anyones thoughts.

I am happy to agree to that as an ideal.

-- 
Wm