Use emojione emoji images

[miketaylr]

https://github.com/Ranks/emojione

Right now we just cough link to somebody else's when we do Markdown2Emoji conversion.

[miketaylr]

A new contender: http://twitter.github.io/twemoji/

[karlcow]

Instead of converting to images, could we just convert to the "right" unicode character?

Images are cool, but they imposed a representation on people and they create HTTP requests for nothing much.

[miketaylr]

@karlcow that would be better for user agents that support emoji unicode. To investigate: if Twitter's lib can feature detect rather than force images on everyone.

The big elephant with emoji is that Chrome and Android stock browsers do not support them. :/ That's why all these image solutions/hacks exist.

See http://caniemoji.com/android/

[miketaylr]

Chrome finally added support: https://twitter.com/addyosmani/status/543520233294942209

But Android is still an issue and Chrome will be for a few months until their users are upgraded.

[miketaylr]

I think it's probably good enough to just use Twitter's emoji image CDN (which is allowed): e.g., https://twemoji.maxcdn.com/36x36/2764.png

[karlcow]

I would be in favor of just not pushing images for emojis. I don't think we gain a lot with it. And I prefer we stay with real characters. But that's my 2 cents. ;)

[miketaylr]

OK. As an experiment we're only going to be serving the real unicode emoji chars, as part of #604. If someone opens a bug complaining about emoji support for older browsers we'll re-open this one and either use emojione or twemoji. :)