> What do you dislike about their solution? Regional indicators (two of them compose to a flag Emoji) can make many Unicode operations inefficient. For example

> What do you dislike about their solution? Regional indicators (two of them compose to a flag Emoji) can make many Unicode operations inefficient. For example in the grapheme cluster segmentation it should pair two regional indicators [1], so with a very long run of regional indicators it is impossible to partially apply the segmentation (which is often the case). There really should have been two pairs of regional indicators, the first used for the first letter and the second used for the second letter---just like surrogate pairs. [1] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-31.html#GB12 http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/tr29-31.html#GB12 > In fairness, Unicode has long had emoticons. Emoji merely expanded its repertoire. Well, Unicode also has dingbats for the compatibility. I don't blame the Unicode consortium for the decision. I do blame those nasty Japanese carriers for permanently harming the Unicode standard though :-)