> They don't need to be. Nothing about the Unicode codepoint for e.g. U+1F603 "grinning face with big eyes" says the "face" needs to even be visualized as being on a head. It could be doing a cheshire-cat-smile thing, just eyes and a mouth — ":D" but rotated 90 degrees. And, in fact, that's exactly what it was, in the DoCoMo image-font, one of the three that led to the Unicode introduction of emoji!

Okay, one vendor opted to do simpler emoji, but the other two displayed faces, right? Moreover, Japanese carriers don’t have the monopoly on inventing small images expressing emotions. The "Western" world had ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and other IMs (say, Poland’s Gadu-Gadu). And all those had emoticons: typing ":D" would turn into an image of a yellow circle with eyes and a grinning mouth.

And personally, I would prefer the colorful, lively emoji, as opposed to plain punctuation turned 90 degrees. I guess all the current emoji vendors think this way.

I remember when my perfectly clear :) became one picture in yahoo messenger and another in AIM. You should have seen my face when the little <3 my boyfriend and I texted to each other became a gaudy, beating red heart right before my eyes. It's gotten easier to opt out of over the years, but there was a while there when none of the SMS apps allowed you to just send the text without converting it to whatever picture they thought you should want. I think if we'd never gone through that stage, I would hate them less. As it stands, we've made this a whole lot more complicated than it has to be and the art of interpreting the text emoticons is basically lost.

Also, I've got an ex-coworker in her late 40's who apparently now types in sentences where the majority of the parts of speech are replaced by an emoji. "Radishes are 'thumbs down' 'vomiting face'" and other statements built with the same grammar. She's an idiot and that was apparent long before this started, but it's gotten worse over the last 4-5 years.

Basically, I'd like to opt out of picture emojis. I'm not sure anything worthwhile has been communicated with them. Well, maybe leave out grandparents. My husband's grandmother isn't a fast typer, so she sends messages mostly made of sweet emojis and you know it's sent with love. But anyone actually trying to make a point with them irritates me. It feels like they're talking like a baby, but in print.

I absolutely agree with you. I see no need for emojis. Maybe it was fun when some IM apps started to turn text (like :-* ) into little images, but now we have software for making emojis, software for rendering emojis, thousands of utf8 codepoints for every possible emoji, emojis of all races and genders, bugs in software because it was supposed to have text input and can't handle emojis correctly, whole sites and fonts and keyboards made specifically for emojis… Did humanity really waste thousands of hours so that people can send a little poop image?

Can people just explain their feelings as they always did in the past, or if that's for some reason not possible, just send a photo or a jpeg of a smiling cartoonish face? Do we really need emojis as they are, sequences of bites that have to be standardized and render correctly on every device and any font?

I just don't get this obsession with emojis. It started as a fun toy, but now it's a huge waste of time for thousands of developers.

Emojis exist in Unicode because people have written emotion-face pictograms inline in text documents (even before the advent of computers!), and Unicode needs a way to encode those existing documents such that one ":D rotated 90 degrees" is machine-readably-identical to another ":D rotated 90 degrees." For the sake of e.g. screen readers, sentiment analysis, etc.

But there's no reason that said pictograms need to have a rendering like anything more than what people would draw them as on paper. The Unicode ellipsis exists to encode the separate intent of "writing an ellipsis" from just writing three dots — but it's still just rendered as three dots.