emoji

 Emoji  are “picture characters” often used like emoticons, either expressively or as punctuation in text notes, as self-standing responses in conversations, or as reactions (reacji).

Why
Emoji can be used to briefly communicate an impression, or more creatively punctuate and add emotional context to plain text.

How to support
As a developer of IndieWeb related software and services, supporting emoji requires paying careful attention to three areas:
 * user input: make sure wherever a user can enter text that you handle emoji either by allowing and supporting it, or providing good feedback to the user where it may be disallowed (e.g. perhaps in a username)
 * storage: make sure your software and interfaces which store textual content support full fidelity Unicode both storing and retrieving
 * display: either directly render emoji via its Unicode characters, or if you are doing the extra work to display representative images (like many social media silos do), be sure to put the the respective Unicode characters in the  text of the images

See this article for more support and implementation tips:
 * 2016-08-06: Solve for emoji originally posted at: http://glasnt.com/blog/2016/08/06/solve-for-emoji.html

IndieWeb Examples
Emoji are prominently used in reacji responses and tagmoji aggregation pages.


 * includes emoji characters in note and photo contents, and outputs the raw emoji characters in the HTML rather than replacing them with images. Examples:
 * 's posts show a different profile picture depending on the emoji used in the post. more info: Emoji avatars for my website

standardized vs platform-specific display
Many silos standardize their emoji display by replacing them with the same image on all platforms. (e.g. WhatsApp, Twitter, Telegram, Threma). Replacing them with images also allows to show colored emoji everywhere, which is very difficult using fonts, since there are conflicting standards for multi-colored glyphs. Several permissively-licensed image sets are available, e.g. by Twitter, Emoji One and Google. If a site replaces emoji with images, it should set the alt="" attribute to the text version of the emoji.

miscommunication
Emoji are rendered differently on different platforms, devices, and operating systems, with some examples leading to differing interpretations of the same emoji, depending on how they are displayed to the user.

Sometimes these differences can be stark enough to cause a miscommunication between senders and readers.


 * http://grouplens.org/blog/investigating-the-potential-for-miscommunication-using-emoji/
 * http://mentalfloss.com/article/70879/9-emojis-look-completely-different-other-phones
 * https://twitter.com/AstroKatie/status/1299682727093039105
 * "We, the people of the internet, deserve a hug emoji that is solemn and sympathetic and doesn’t look like you’re mocking the person with jazz hands 🤗" @AstroKatie August 29, 2020

may harm accessibility
Many people have begun to put large strings of emojis into usernames. Accessibility experts argue those who use screen readers must get through verbal explanations of each emoji in a field that was designed for a name and not biographical information. See tweet

Implementing

 * emoji-php-comparsion script that compares php emoji detection libraries and reports results
 * Gitlab on using native Emoji with fallback for unsupported ones (complicated!) https://about.gitlab.com/2018/05/30/journey-in-native-unicode-emoji/

History
Emoji were originally associated with cellular telephone usage in Japan, but now popular worldwide. The word emoji comes from the Japanese 絵 (e ≅ picture) + 文字 (moji ≅ written character).


 * https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/ — Good overview over the history and differences
 * https://socializzed.com/en/blog/socialeaks/dp-211sw-emoji-rosetta-stone — The first emoji set for a mobile phone in 1997