Emoji Encoding, Unicode, and Internationalization with Naomi Meyer

#codeland #internationalization #localization #javascript

Naomi is a Software Development Engineer at Adobe on the Globalization, Core Services team where she works on the internationalization and localization of Creative Cloud products. Before coding full time, Naomi worked as a teacher across Asia and West Africa. She enjoys weekends outside - hiking, camping, and riding bikes.

Talk: Emoji Encoding, Unicode �, and Internationalization

Abstract: Why does '👩🏿‍🎤'.length = 7? Is JavaScript UTF-8 or UTF-16? What happens under the hood when you set ? Have you ever wondered how emoji and complex scripting languages are encoded to work correctly across browsers and devices - for billions of people around the world? Or how new emoji are introduced and approved? Have you ever seen one of these: □ � “special” glyph characters before and want more information on why they might appear and how to avoid them in the future? Let’s talk about Unicode encoding in JavaScript and across the world wide web! We’ll go over best practices, common pitfalls, and provide resources to learn more - even where to go if you want to submit a new emoji proposal! 😀

Here is a download link to the talk slides (PDF)

This talk will be presented as part of CodeLand:Distributed on July 23. After the talk is streamed as part of the conference, it will be added to this post as a recorded video.

Latest comments (38)

charlottechenxiayi • Dec 14 '20

Thanks, Naomi! Your presentation is very easy to understand and intriguing. I am a grad student major in Translation and Localization Management and assisted engineers in the AI Lab with computational linguistics. Knowing more about Unicode really helps me a lot in deepening my understanding of a lot of interrelated knowledge.

Dana Ottaviani • Aug 3 '20

Wow, I'll never look at emojis the same way again. 😆

Great talk Naomi!

Kate Dameron • Jul 24 '20

Will the recorded talk be on this page?

Swastik Baranwal • Jul 24 '20

JS uses UTF-18? TIL

Naomi Meyer • Jul 28 '20

JavaScript is a mix between UCS-2 and UTF-16 here's a great article with more in-depth information 👍

Juan F Gonzalez • Jul 24 '20

That talk was awesooooooome! The encoding for strings in JS blew my mind I now know how to write 'café' 😄

Also that part of proposing an emoji was really cool. It reminded me of this emoji which is a very popular food in my country 😅

Naomi Meyer • Jul 24 '20

Thanks Juan! I'm happy you found it useful 😁

Kate Dameron • Jul 24 '20

Love this talk! U+1F60D

Linda Thompson • Jul 24 '20

What a fun talk! Love your enthusiasm for this. :) I knew there was weirdness with emoji, but hadn't really dug into it yet, so this was informative and fun!