U+FE0E is really interesting, it forces monochrome emoji usage on the immediately preceded emoji (like a skin tone modifier or any other modifier). I have previously run into the issue of the play-pause characters (U+25B6, U+23F8) being inconsistently replaced with their color versions when I was trying to use them in a UI. It looks like this is a great guarantee that that won't happen.
Also is it seems hacker news automatically removes emoji, maybe this modifier would allow them to keep them (in b/w form) and still maintain the polished appearance.
It won't, because U+FE0E is just a suggestion, not a mandate. If your system doesn't have an appropriate monochrome replacement it will just fallback on the colored emoji.
I was shocked just now reading about this "variation selector", what is next, conditionals and variables??? I thought (still think) Unicode is for text, these are more like control characters in some markup language or a transmission protocol. It seems gross. I obviously don't know, but something tells me this has little real world support and degrades poorly?
Variant selection was required for some languages, and was a convenient way to implement "combining" characters. Once the feature existed its use got extended to all sorts of cases, just like the flags are "ligatures".
> Also is it seems hacker news automatically removes emoji
And some other characters like UPPER HALF BLOCK, LOWER HALF BLOCK, FULL BLOCK, LEFT HALF BLOCK, & RIGHT HALF BLOCK, and LIGHT SHADE, MEDIUM SHADE, & DARK SHADE
Also is it seems hacker news automatically removes emoji, maybe this modifier would allow them to keep them (in b/w form) and still maintain the polished appearance.