[jrockway]

> Today you need to ship an emoji font and make sure that your font engine can render color graphics.

It seems like it goes even deeper than that. I've been noticing things like <face><unicode female symbol> that I thought was some sort of meme that I just didn't get. It turns out, that's how "older devices" (the latest version of Chrome in my case) renders the new emoji that you can attach a gender to.

I agree that it all kind of went off the deep end. You can easily come up with an infinite number of pictures that you might want to attach to a text message, but there aren't an infinite number of codepoints. So the race to add emoji will never end, and it will never be possibly to satisfy everyone. I would have just given up. At least I can include a picture of a tanabata tree with any and all text!