You talk about this issue like text and images have never shared space next to one another in the same gui control on a computer screen. More importantly, your

You talk about this issue like text and images have never shared space next to one another in the same gui control on a computer screen. More importantly, your history is all wrong. Emoticons have been used in the west since the telegraph and kaomojis (emojis) showed up in the 80s and have been known outside of Japan not long after. These images are simply an interpretation of common emojis into graphical form, they literally map something like ^_^ to a smiley face. Somewhere along the line, it was thought to be a good idea to let people just choose from common emoticons and have it map to the character implementation rather than doing the reverse (because remembering things is hard). On the receiving end, the ^_^ is simply replaced with whatever image the chat app has chosen to represent that. Later, DoCoMo, KDDI and Softbank decided to further formalize the emoji codec mapping as part of Shift-JIS (and ISO-2022-JP) and that's why we have encodings for snail, minidisc and chicken leg, but not mosque, pork chop and blue jeans. Here's the mapping table https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.unicode.org%2F~scherer%2Femoji4unicode%2Fsnapshot%2Femojidata.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.unicode.... What the logic was to do this is anybody's guess, but it was probably for bandwidth efficiency. It would be more appropriate for there to be an entirely separate "expressions" standard for encoding various emoticon systems (there's several) and providing a standard iconography. You can already mix and match fonts and languages with images in most rich-text controls. Unicode is not the correct place to do this. And amazingly, text-controls, as we have already established, can support fonts and images next to each other. So extending a text control to support unicode, images and expressions, would seem more logical than shoehorning shift-jis, which is not a human written language, into unicode. Here's the original proposal that started this madness, so you can read the rationale. There's lots of people to blame for this, but we can start with the authors of this proposal. http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2009/09025r2-emoji.pdf