I'm torn on this. The best part is that the emoji are at least getting standardized. I remember the bad days of conveying this by either relying on images or fonts that may not be installed on the target system; especially a cross platform problem. Now one may be relying on Unicode code points that may not be _supported_ by the target font but that feels better to me than the options.
What strikes me as odd is that they're adding so many. Sure, it makes sense that Unicode could be kind enough to support conveying happiness or sadness in a message, but "Person doing cartwheel"...? Any alphabet has boundaries for the letters, I think the emojis should have received a boundary too. They are a standardizing organ, why not... Just standardize it? In advance. Treat emojis like a language of emotions. If not we'll soon enough (if not already...) end up with the same problem as before. That just because of the sheer size of the emoji space and the effort needed to design a font for them, we can no longer rely on them all being implemented correctly, which means they are no longer useful as a standardized set of symbols.
If you've been there from the start, like Apple, sure then it's no big deal. Just a few new symbols per year to implement. If you're designing a new font to support emojis, you'll risk needing a whole team of designers just for this silly subset of symbols alone. There's also a user interface problem mounting as for how to even pick and organize them all.
What strikes me as odd is that they're adding so many. Sure, it makes sense that Unicode could be kind enough to support conveying happiness or sadness in a message, but "Person doing cartwheel"...? Any alphabet has boundaries for the letters, I think the emojis should have received a boundary too. They are a standardizing organ, why not... Just standardize it? In advance. Treat emojis like a language of emotions. If not we'll soon enough (if not already...) end up with the same problem as before. That just because of the sheer size of the emoji space and the effort needed to design a font for them, we can no longer rely on them all being implemented correctly, which means they are no longer useful as a standardized set of symbols.
If you've been there from the start, like Apple, sure then it's no big deal. Just a few new symbols per year to implement. If you're designing a new font to support emojis, you'll risk needing a whole team of designers just for this silly subset of symbols alone. There's also a user interface problem mounting as for how to even pick and organize them all.