Don't forget that most of these characters fall outside the Unicode BMP. Testing your APIs with these is a great way to see if any part of them (database, serialization, etc) can't handle these codepoints.
Unless the Emoji-American community steps out of the shadows and organizes into effective advocacy groups, many of these gaps in functionality will never be closed.
That second one is oddly broken (FF on Win7). I see the fallback image http://unicodelovehotel.com/unicodelovehotel.jpg but when I select it, I get a bed with a heart over it. 🏩 I believe that's Verdana in my browser.
The old one didn't have these symbols. When I installed it on debian linux (called: ttf-ancient-fonts - but you have to use the testing repository) it was used immediately.
Well I remember testing it on love hotel, which I specifically checked was in symbola if I set the font manually. But it wouldn't render if it was embedded in normal text.
OSX Snow Leopard: Fail. Junk display in Safari & Chrome, Hex boxen on Firefox. Actually works in the latest version of Camino, although the story seems to have come out not quite right: Santa, Rocket, People, Fish, Pizza, Building, Movie camera, Earmuffs, Watermelon, Bike, Chicken, (Hide-and-seek) Seeker.
A "If you don't see the emoji, then download these fonts" right up-front would have been immensely helpful.
> Actually works in the latest version of Camino, although the story seems to have come out not quite right: Santa, Rocket, People, Fish, Pizza, Building, Movie camera, Earmuffs, Watermelon, Bike, Chicken, (Hide-and-seek) Seeker.
I get the exact same result on iOS5[0], so apparently the story just has no relation to the emoji. And the characters are not super clear at default font sizes
There's a broken [NEW] emoji lower down the page though, displays as a hexbox.
[0] confirmed by UnicodeChecker, the characters are {FATHER CHRISTMAS} {ROCKET} {TWO MEN HOLDING HANDS} {FISH} {SLICE OF PIZZA} {LOVE HOTEL} {MOVIE CAMERA} {HEADPHONE} {WATERMELON} {BICYCLE} {ROOSTER} {SEE-NO-EVIL MONKEY}
Those of us who haven't upgraded, for whatever reason, can just push a rope, eh? Display is linked to the Unicode renderer and available fonts. Either Camino did some sort of net-fetch magic for the characters it didn't have fonts for or my regular browsers are slightly broken and don't realize that they actually have the right font available.
Perhaps I am missing something, but how does a picture of Santa Claus, Rocket, 2 People, Fish, Pizza and other seemingly out of place things translate into "Let's go meet at Chipotle and..."
I assume that this is an error. I couldn't get it to work in Firefox on OSX 10.7 so I used Safari.
I attempted to read the article at first, but Firefox, on OSX, didn't display anything at all. So I got confused and kept re-reading the first paragraph or so before I realized something was missing. By that point I wasn't focused on actually reading the article, but getting the emoji on the screen.
Funny. I ran into an issue a few weeks ago where coworkers couldn't see me when I was online. Turns out my computer name (🐒💨) caused an error in Adium (which most coworkers use for chat).
Who knows what other weird issues this was causing... so I reverted back to a proper ASCII computer name.
I was actually playing with using Unicode emoji for a webpage this week. Being able to use characters as icons would be fantastically easy for a lot of use cases!
Unfortunately, as others have noted, it doesn't work on many platforms: Safari works on 10.7+, Firefox doesn't seem to support it at all yet [1], and I don't follow Chromium that much any more but it seems like it's not there yet, either [2].
Emoji work in most browsers. The problem is that many fonts are missing the corresponding characters. You just need to pick a good font. You'll be missing full color icons, though.
Example page with an emoji character that works almost everywhere (with a web font based on Symbola): http://unicodepanda.com/
I would guess that most fonts will lack emoji characters, and always will, just like most fonts won't have all umpteen-thousand hanzi/kanji. I'm no expert on HTML fonts, but I thought it was the browser's job to find and use a font which contains the character on the page. I can write Japanese text, and specify it should be "Comic Sans", and every web browser I've ever tried will pick a reasonable font to display them, rather than leaving a Comic Sans-sized blank area on the page.
OS X comes with at least one font with these characters, yet apart from Safari, none of my web browsers can seem to use it. To me, that means it doesn't work.
While not exactly what you are proposing, ff you want/need to use characters as icons, there is a pretty neat hack called Font Awesome (http://fortawesome.github.com/Font-Awesome/). It's used to replace the twitter bootstrap icons with font files; seems to work pretty well so far (with no need to re-color individual icons... you can style the font/icons with css).
Things like <div class="icon-flag" style="color:red; font-size:36px"> will create a 36point red flag character for you.
It's a shame on OSX/iOS. When I've used these characters and viewed on Safari it turns them into raster icons ... exactly what I don't want. Windows and Linux are fine.
>It's a shame on OSX/iOS. When I've used these characters and viewed on Safari it turns them into raster icons ... exactly what I don't want. Windows and Linux are fine.
Your comment does not make sense.
1) When "you've used these characters" where? On a webpage?
2) They ARE raster icons. What did you expect them to be? Fonts don't have multiple colors.
3) How does "Windows and Linux" handle them better? Most apps there don't handle them AT ALL.
You seem to be mistaken. Some operating systems display them as colour images, but that is not essential at all. They are mapped to Unicode characters, and so when displayed as characters, as in normal applications with an appropriate font, they are vector-based and monochrome. See e.g. http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf linked from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji
These are unicode codepoints and handled just fine everywhere but on Apple gear, and (I think IE6/XP). If you've never seen them it means you are on Apple or never bothered to install the fonts.
Annoyingly Emoji is not rendered in Google Chrome on OSX Lion (my main browser), I just get blank spaces, it's the same in Firefox. It seems Emoji only works in Safari on Lion.
yeah, I found the same - however on mouseover and clickthrough on the wiki links to the emoji pages (above this post in the comments) I am getting the characters in both the link preview and in the title bar.
