Add smileys support ?

My problem with emoticons is mainly a design based one, they usually don't blend in very good with interfaces. If the design is done properly and there are clear options for enabling/disabling them I'm totally OK with them.

Hm, the browsers' inter pixel rendering differ a lot, I tried to design some graphical emoticons using html/css but the results were different with zoom levels and browsers. Maybe in the bright future of web technologies ;)

@goob A lot of services use emojis now. These are symbols that can be copy-pasted into a field either manually by the user or from a pop-up menu. They can be displayed in "plain" form or replaced by a graphic. I have successfully copy-pasted most of these into a text editor (Geany), which indicates that they are compatible with any service or system utilizing modern character sets.
http://getemoji.com/
😄 😃 😀 😊 ☺ 😉 😍 😘 😚 😗 😙 😜 😝 😛 😳 😁 😔 😌 😒 😞 😣 😢 😂 😭 😪 😥 😰 😅 😓 😩

Which of my comments is that a reply to? It doesn't seem to match any of my comments.

ps: I bloody hate emoji.

@goob I was replying to your last comment. Anyway, if you don't want to see emojis, they would be incredibly easy to filter out, because they're just characters.

OK, thanks. That wasn't clear.

I realise I personally can filter out characters, or images from a certain source, by using browser extensions and the like (which I already do). However, I think if Diaspora chooses to support smileys, it should also offer users an easy way to disable them from their streams from within Diaspora's own UI. That was the point I was making.

@goob Oh, sure, I agree. Users should be able to turn off features that they don't like. Sorry if I wasn't clear about that.

No problem. We've understood each other in the end!

Currently, there's already a kind of smiley support in the publisher. "<3", for exmple is translated to ♥

That's not too bad, I guess, because if you wanted to write "c<3" without it becoming "c♥" , you can just put a space in between the two characters. Having escape characters is still much better, because they don't appear in the output the way a space does.