Alastair Houghton wrote, > ...but they were definitely within the scope of the > Unicode project as encoding them provides interoperability.
That's one way of looking at it. Another way would be that the emoji were definitely outside the scope of the Unicode project as encoding them violated Unicode's initial encoding principles. The opposition was strong, but resistance was futile. Anyone interested in the arguments made at the time should check the Unicode public list archives in late 2008 and early 2009. Here's the link for January 2009: http://www.unicode.org/mail-arch/unicode-ml/y2009-m01/index.html Surprisingly, though, I have found at least one roundabout use for the emoji. When reading message boards and comment pages I've found that it's quite simple to skip any messages which are peppered with emoji without missing anything of substance. As far as interoperability goes, there's scads of emoji in the wild which aren't currently in Unicode. Every kind of hobby or interest seems to generate emoji specific to that area of interest.
