Yup, you're not alone. In my personal opinion, that's more of rich text formatting (text with images), not extra characters anymore. That's debatable (and the

Yup, you're not alone. In my personal opinion, that's more of rich text formatting (text with images), not extra characters anymore. That's debatable (and the debate's lost already, huh) but I still believe pictures (emojis) should've been a separate encoding, independent from Unicode, as there is a distinction between a grapheme and icon (yes, the distinction's very blurred by pictograms and ideograms - and I'm not sure I get all those things correctly, but still...)