[Gigachad]

This argument was lost the moment Unicode was created. Japanese carriers had created their own standard for emoji encoding for sms. And they would not switch to Unicode unless the emoji were ported over.

It’s a tricky situation. Maybe allowing an arbitrary bitmap char to represent any emoji would have been better but then we could have ended up in a situation where normal text or meaningful punctuation or perhaps even fonts would get encoded as bitmaps.

For something like a face or hand gesture, a bitmap likely would have been better since it would at least look the same on all platforms.

[Findecanor]

I don't think that argument holds water. Emoji could just as well have been encoded as markup. There were for instance long-established conventions of using strings starting with : and ; . Bulletin boards extended that to a convention using letters delimited by : for example :rolleyes: . Not to mention that those codes can be typed more efficiently than browsing in an Emoji Picker box.

Because emoji became characters, text rendering and font formats had to be extended to support them. There are four different ways to encode emoji in OpenType 1.8:

* Apple uses embedded PNG

* Google uses embedded colour bitmaps

* Microsoft uses flat glyphs in different colours layered on top of one-another

* Adobe and Mozilla use embedded SVG.

[lmm]

> Emoji could just as well have been encoded as markup.

They could have, but they were already being encoded as character codepoints in existing charactersets. So any character encoding scheme that wanted to replace all use cases for existing charactersets needed to match that. If switching charactersets meant you lost the ability to use emoji until you upgraded all your applications to support some markup format, people would just not switch.

[account42]

> If switching charactersets meant you lost the ability to use emoji until you upgraded all your applications to support some markup format, people would just not switch.

You need to upgrade those applications to support Unicode too.

[lmm]

Not necessarily, most applications already supported multiple encodings, having the OS implement one of the unicode encodings was often all that was needed.

[numpad0]

I might think the important part was Japanese carriers were weaponizing flip phone culture to gatekeep "PCs" and open standard smartphones out of their microtransaction ecosystem. Emoji was one of the keys to disprove the FUD that iPhone can't be equal to flip phones and establish first class citizen status.