I think it's just a matter of time before some legitimate cardiology hospital accidentally adopts this as their logo.

If my state supported UTF-32, I'd name my next kid this.

Any Unicode encoding (such as the more common UTF-8) will do just fine.

Poor child, think of all the problems he will encounter once he discovers the internet!

It's all well and good until the poor kid's teacher thinks it's Windows-1252 and the whole class laughs at him.

It looks different on OS X between Safari and Chrome - Safari uses the built in Lucida Grande font to render a full color unicode love hotel, chrome tries to use the black and white symbola font.

You actually see a fallback image with the transparent character on top in all other browsers, since there isn't support for unicode characters this high (U+1F3E9). If you highlight and right click on the love hotel character on OS X you'll see "Search google for '🏩'" with the full color love hotel character.

Opera just goes all in and renders both the full color version and the black and white.

http://imgur.com/WiiNJ

Thanks - I didn't test Opera, I updated it to show only the color (actual) character in opera and not show the fallback image

I believe it's actually in the special Apple Color Emoji font http://i.imgur.com/sNNAZ.png

What program is that?

Codepoints http://infincia.com/apps/codepoints

:)

Safari only displays a black square on my Mac. Overall, Firefox gives the best looking result.

Duck duck go does a great job when you search for the unicode love hotel! http://cl.ly/3a07430F2i1M1Z1H3u0V

Duck duck go beats google in this case: https://img.skitch.com/20120413-gs9cnmdrcnfgcx3idct62xp35y.j...

A domain dedicated to one Unicode code point!

I guess it's only a matter of time before "pile of poo" (U+1F4A9) gets its own domain, too.

Long predated by "Unicode Snowman for You": http://xn--n3h.net/

Or http://☃.net if you prefer.

Interestingly, I observe my font is rendering the snowflakes around the snowman as pentagons. Some font designer needs to study some more science.

The scourge of the off-by-one error strikes again.

also http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ , which is easier to type

Yeah... About that... http://www.panic.com/blog/2011/07/the-worlds-first-emoji-dom...

Looks like you can get <unicode>.tk domain names, anyone want 🏩.tk? https://img.skitch.com/20120413-b67rwn29c4aydc73jyt3jfwsnk.j...

That was my inspiration for this site.

So what does it take to make my windows browser show the actual character and not the fallback?

Try Safari or Opera

I'm already on Opera. What fonts do I need?

You can remap capslock to <lovehotel> for easy access, if you end up typing it a lot.

Honestly, who decides what characters should be included?

The Unicode Consortium manages the process of defining the unicode standard. Various committees are formed, composed of representatives from whatever other standards bodies are interested and from companies with a stake in the standard.

I learned the answer after reading a great talk (in blog post form) about the ever-growing unicode character set: http://www.reigndesign.com/blog/love-hotels-and-unicode/

🏩