Why don't UTF-8 emojis work?

[jtbell]

Today I learned that I can paste emojis into my Web pages, because I overhauled them a few months ago to use the UTF-8 (Unicode) character set.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji#In_the_Unicode_standard

I wonder if they work here, too:

Aw, I guess not.

Why not? pages here use UTF-8, too: <meta charset="utf-8" />

I see the emojis when I paste them into the editing window, but they don't appear on the page after it's posted.

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Emojis block are not part of the standard set of UTF-8 characters that most fonts support. Here are the fonts that are supported.
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/emoticons/fontsupport.htm

For those fonts you'll need a custom font loaded into the web page. No desktop browser will naively display them.

 

[jtbell]

So the font used in the editing windows is different from the font used when displaying posts?

On my own pages, I don't do anything special at all as far as fonts are concerned. I don't specify the font for body text in my stylesheet, so it's whatever proportional font the browser (Firefox, Mac OS) is set to, which in my case is Times. In my stylesheet I specify h1 and h2 headings to use a sans-serif font, which is set to Helvetica. Emojis work in either body text or headings, and in Firefox's title bar (<title> tag).

I tried changing the default font to a few different settings, and the emojis on my test page still appear. I don't have any of the fonts listed in the table that you link to. There must be something going on behind the scenes somewhere.