[vort3]

I absolutely agree with you. I see no need for emojis. Maybe it was fun when some IM apps started to turn text (like :-* ) into little images, but now we have software for making emojis, software for rendering emojis, thousands of utf8 codepoints for every possible emoji, emojis of all races and genders, bugs in software because it was supposed to have text input and can't handle emojis correctly, whole sites and fonts and keyboards made specifically for emojis… Did humanity really waste thousands of hours so that people can send a little poop image?

Can people just explain their feelings as they always did in the past, or if that's for some reason not possible, just send a photo or a jpeg of a smiling cartoonish face? Do we really need emojis as they are, sequences of bites that have to be standardized and render correctly on every device and any font?

I just don't get this obsession with emojis. It started as a fun toy, but now it's a huge waste of time for thousands of developers.

[derefr]

Emojis exist in Unicode because people have written emotion-face pictograms inline in text documents (even before the advent of computers!), and Unicode needs a way to encode those existing documents such that one ":D rotated 90 degrees" is machine-readably-identical to another ":D rotated 90 degrees." For the sake of e.g. screen readers, sentiment analysis, etc.

But there's no reason that said pictograms need to have a rendering like anything more than what people would draw them as on paper. The Unicode ellipsis exists to encode the separate intent of "writing an ellipsis" from just writing three dots — but it's still just rendered as three dots.