the problem above is purely how HN have done the site, I'm guessing they don't save unicode text ( possibly ascii ) as when you load up the text again all the unicode is stripped from the message
You're right, but that's also kind of the point I'm making -- that your emoji can get stripped or broken purely because a random site or step in your display process decides not to handle the full Unicode.
Unicode emoji relies on sites/platforms:
A) choosing to support the full Unicode set
B) Being up-to-date on the current spec and having glyphs to display for the entire set
Regardless of whether or not it's easy to support -- many, many sites and platforms in the real world don't. When they don't support the full spec, you get invisible characters that can't degrade gracefully, can't be read by screen readers, and that break copy-paste.
I still run into garbled text online that's the result of people copying and pasting smart quotes between platforms that won't render them. Platforms are never gonna catch up to a living spec that is regularly extended, so it's preferable to avoid "novel" Unicode characters and use something that degrades gracefully instead.
Unicode emoji relies on sites/platforms:
A) choosing to support the full Unicode set
B) Being up-to-date on the current spec and having glyphs to display for the entire set
Regardless of whether or not it's easy to support -- many, many sites and platforms in the real world don't. When they don't support the full spec, you get invisible characters that can't degrade gracefully, can't be read by screen readers, and that break copy-paste.
I still run into garbled text online that's the result of people copying and pasting smart quotes between platforms that won't render them. Platforms are never gonna catch up to a living spec that is regularly extended, so it's preferable to avoid "novel" Unicode characters and use something that degrades gracefully instead.