Member Since: 1/12/2012
Posts: 18,340
|
Quote:
Originally posted by ***Chu
What's the difference between an emoji and a smiley?
|
Quote:
An emoticon is a typographic display of a facial representation, used to convey emotion in a text only medium. Like so: ;-)
...
Unlike emoticons, emoji are actual pictures, of everything from a set of painted nails ( 💅 ) to a slightly whimsical ghost ( 👻 ). And where emoticons were invented to portray emotion in environments where nothing but basic text is available, emoji are actually extensions to the character set used by most operating systems today, Unicode.
In essence, emoji are treated by the computer as letters from a non-western language, in much the same way as Japanese and Chinese characters are. But that also means that the software has to explicitly support them – otherwise it is forced to display a placeholder icon, or even just a blank space (which you might see between the brackets in the paragraph above if your browser doesn’t support emoji).
It also means that each company has to provide its own interpretations of what the emoji descriptions should actually look like – and they don’t always agree. Take the implementations of the “dancer” emoji: for Twitter and Apple, it’s a female flamenco dancer. But for Google, it was, until recently, a John Travolta lookalike dancing disco style. And now it’s a weird blobby thing. So if you’re about to tell someone “you look gorgeous, like a 💃”, make sure they aren’t reading it on a new Android phone.
|
Source
|
|
|
|
all time
