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Discussion on: You Are Using Emojis The Wrong Way

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Christos Litras

The square in the browser will happen in old browsers and even for newly added emojis, there will be updates that will be added to systems eventually. In our days, it's user's responsibility to have their browsers updated.

Also, different styles do not change the meaning, the meaning is the same, it's just the style that changes. Different platforms display different styles means that the users are used to these styles and we should not change that for them just because we want the emojis to look like we want them to look (or the style we think it's standard style). Use SVGs directly instead and not the standards; or use standard emojis and leave it to the system or the users’ preferences (which might be a different font more friendly to people with sight issues for example).

Having an automated document parser on each page load to change emojis with SVG assets is a terrible thing to do in many aspects. This should be done after saving an article and then the engine should render it (a markdown text to HTML maybe) and only then parse and replace the emojis.

I would argue for the alt usage. Alternative image text should not be used to have the actual emoji inside it but a description instead like Twitter. If you do it only for the selection thing it could be considered "OK".