> Surely we could've made better use of the Unicode space […] There is plenty of space. Keep in mind that one of the goals of Unicode is to be able to represe

> Surely we could've made better use of the Unicode space […] There is plenty of space. Keep in mind that one of the goals of Unicode is to be able to represent existing corpora of text by means of a global standard. Emoji were in widespread use in Japanese mobile phones long before smartphones existed; that alone legitimises their presence in the Unicode standard. Like a dictionary, the Unicode standard is in a large part descriptive rather than prescriptive. It catalogues what is in use, not what ought to be used. However, recent emoji contributions do seem to have been made in the spirit of filling lacunae in the set.