Fwd: [art] use of Emojis in Internet Standards

[Larry Masinter]

https://LarryMasinter.net  https://interlisp.org

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Robert Viragh <rvi...@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 10, 2026 at 6:41 AM
Subject: [art] use of Emojis in Internet Standards
To: <a...@ietf.org>

Dear ART Working Group and mailing list:

Thank you for your work on Internet standards which helps with interoperability and makes the Internet possible, and better for everyone.

We are developing an Internet standard (a draft specification is attached) which is currently undergoing cryptographic peer review as to its characteristics.  Our implementers are saying that the specification of Emojis presents extreme difficulties.

We would like to know whether you think it can be appropriate to include Emojis in an Internet Standard, and whether it has widespread compatibility with Windows, Mac, and Linux, and Android, iOS, and Windows Phone devices.

We thought that our table of emojis would be simple and straightforward to implement:

(our proposed table of emojis).  We chose the emojis to be widely compatible and easily recognizable.

Our implementers are having trouble matching them.

Here are our questions:

1. Are there a set of emojis that are considered widely compatible?

2. Do you think it is appropriate to include it as normative in an Internet standard?

3. How should emojis be specified in an Internet standard?

In terms of ergonomics, we have found that this ergonomic presentation makes it up to 75% faster to discern differences.  You can try this for yourself in this ergonomic comparison tool:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/05e8b21b-fb31-4c07-83e2-5c8138c25670 (for fast discernment, you can also focus on the first four words and checksum at the end, before moving on to comparing the whole hash).

Therefore we would like to continue to keep emojis in our Internet Standard as we go through the standards process.

We welcome all thoughts you may have regarding emojis in Internet standards.

Best regards,

Robert Viragh

State of Utopia

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