I always thought that unicode opened pandora's box with emojis. It makes sense to represent those that already existed in previous encodings for compatibility (it is meant to be universal, after all), but beyond that it's just a minefield IMO. In particular a big annoyance with emojis is that their representation varies a lot from device to device or even from application to application. You can expect that a B or a Ф will be recognizable in any non-windings font, but many emojis look different enough to the point of changing pretty drastically their semantics.

I'm starting to think it would've made more sense to allow unicode to allow to embed small vector icons directly in the text format. Some kind of restricted SVG-like dialect that would be handled correctly by all unicode parsers and look the same everywhere.

This way anybody could design their own application specific icons and emojis, you could either allow free-form emojis or only whitelist site-approved variants. Think something like fontawesome, but it'd work anywhere you can put unicode text.

Sure, it would significantly increase the size of the text but is it usually a big problem? It would compress very well, and in my experience text storage is pretty negligible these days in most applications compared to images and videos.

Instead it seems that we need to allocate codepoints and ask people to create fonts for textile care symbols, and national dishes, and all sorts of sports, and...