> Both Evans and Danesi set out to explain [...] why we can ignore naysayers who cite them as another example of the erosion of standards. The use of inline pi

> Both Evans and Danesi set out to explain [...] why we can ignore naysayers who cite them as another example of the erosion of standards. The use of inline pictographs to enrich the text is not bad by itself and actually well supported by their arguments. We had them in instant messengers and chatting systems for a long time. But it is a completely different matter to put them into the Unicode standard. The original set of Emoji was highly culture-dependent (for examle there had been only 10 country flags, as those were the most relevant countries to Japaneses---Unicode correctly recognized this problem and yet picked a bad solution!), defined by glyphs and not by its supposed meaning unlike most scripts in Unicode (that's still true today, and we are still suffering from different Emoji glyphs for multiple vendors), and could be very quickly declining in use for whatever reason (like emoticons trending and declining). So Emoji is quite unsuitable for encoding without a compelling reason. Here the compelling reason turned out to be the interoperability with Japanese carriers [1], and that's why Emoji is an inevitable but ugly addition to the Unicode standard. I feel it is correct to claim both that (the contemporary usage of) Emoji is a great cultural trend and that (the Unicode addition of) Emoji is absurd. [1] The original proposal http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf is very clear in this regard.