Asmus, I think I see your point. Certainly I didn't intend to take the experience of encoding the emoji characters and promote it as some sort of preferred path for getting characters encoded in Unicode. Far from it.
Rather, I was trying to describe the use case for the emoji symbols: someone (the Japanese telcos) had made them available for use in the context of plain-text, and a seemingly large population had actually used them that way. Whether they were actually *implemented* as plain-text characters (in the PUA of Shift-JIS), or as some sort of inline images, is not the point. I think the case would need to be made, as is usually necessary for either formal or informal character proposals, that there is actually a non-trivial population that wants or needs to use the proposed "character" as plain text. -- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell
