Why unicode emojis in wordpress displayed with <img> tag?
There is a great answer here on wordpress development that tells you how to disable the svg styled icons, its this line:
add_filter( 'emoji_svg_url', '__return_false' );Also check out the other hooks that you might need to fully disable emojis.
Wordpress uses svg emojis for two reasons I think:
- Their emojis are more "flat" and therefore look more modern
- When being used as images, emojis can have different sizes than the text sourrounding them.