[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.