I agree that they introduced unnecessary complexity for text encoding, and for font-rendering (which are expected to support multi-coloured emoticons now). I on

I agree that they introduced unnecessary complexity for text encoding, and for font-rendering (which are expected to support multi-coloured emoticons now). I once started writing on a text editor, and then fell deep into Unicode handling. I have now spent more work on the Unicode parts than on anything else in the program. I think that the industry could have instead adopted the old web-forum convention of colon-word-encoding, originating from ASCII art. Example: ":facepalm:". When the sequence is not supported as an emoji, it degrades gracefully into text that can be understood by anyone reading it instead of into a sequence of empty squares or diamonds with question marks in them. Text also provides a more efficient input method than having to browse for an icon in a list.