I find that I really can't live without these lil'
guys 
. But while I use them all the time in plain
text, on an HTML file it doesn't do to write something
like “:-)” for a happy smiley. Up to now I
used the great and mighty Unicode, but Unicode only has
U+2639 WHITE FROWNING FACE and U+363A WHITE SMILING FACE as smileys
go, which is a bit meager 
(anyone care to submit to the
Unicode/ISO-10646 Joint Technical Committee a repertoire of a couple
thousand smileys that they might insert in Unicode plane 3 or 4? after
all, with all the useless junk that goes in Unicode, a couple thousand
smileys won't matter much, and they put all the 易經 hexagrams,
which may be only 64 in number, but it's a kind of precedent).
Besides, not everyone has the font to display even those characters,
and some may just see a box instead (here is a WHITE SMILING FACE
between quotes: “☺”).
So I did what everyone does, I got a bunch of smiley images (from
PHPbb) and I'll be
using them. 
And, yes, I'll be really careful not to overuse them. I hate
smiley excess just as much as the next man: they can get really
distracting. But this entry is an exception, because it's
precisely the point. 
Since I found them with PHPbb, these smileys (which
are Copyright © their legitimate Copyright owner) are covered, as far
as I know, free: you can redistribute them and/or modify them under
the terms of the GNU General
Public License; they are distributed in the hope that they will be
useful, but without any warranty, without even the implied
warranty of representing my emotions at the time of
writing. 