It’s kind of both in practice. Emojis are codepoints in the vast character space of Unicode that are defined as “a drawing of an ant” or “a hand pointing up” or

It’s kind of both in practice. Emojis are codepoints in the vast character space of Unicode that are defined as “a drawing of an ant” or “a hand pointing up” or whatever. And it is perfectly easy for any modern device to render that codepoint in its own default emoji font. But. If you visit a website that has its own emoji, such as Twitter or Facebook, then it’ll replace those codepoints with inline images.