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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

Emoticons are simply interpreting :-) as a smiley face, no Unicode invention is necessary.

Yes, and emoji came from emoticons, meeting a need to express more complex ideas. Unicode adopted emoji after they were popularised.

> meeting a need to express more complex ideas

Still not necessary to have special Unicode code points for them.

    :poop:

should do just fine. No need for more than that.

:poop: was never made into stuffed animals or pillows either. Branding and imagry means something to some people despite not to you.

What does branding have to do with Unicode? Is there a Unicode code point for the coca-cola trademark or the Amazon smile?

Probably by Unicode 16 there will be. :p

Not in the Unicode guidelines as they currently stand ':).

They are very explicit that this is not permitted [1].

Also, RE :poop: 1. Huffman encoding philosophy - encode frequently used symbols using fewer bytes. 2. Standards are helpful, :poop: is very English-centric, whereas U+1F4A9 is much more interpretable.

[1] https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#Selection_Factors_I...

>Not in the Unicode guidelines as they currently stand ':).

I know, I'm just being humorously facetious. (Or at least I'd like to think that I am.)

What about this one:

  :couple-with-heart-woman-man-light-skin-tone-medium-light-skin-tone:

Nothing wrong with that. The renderer can do what it likes with that.

The thing is, once you open the door to every-picture-must-have-a-unique-code-point, where do you stop? How many trillions of code points are needed?

Hey, Unicode should take the next logical step, and allow embedded Javascript! What could possibly go wrong with that?

Hey, it degrades gracefully when displayed on a system that doesn't support that glyph. Sounds like a nice feature to me.

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