I should clarify, as this is going off on a tangent.
I don’t like smilies, so I rarely use them. My main complaint was the constant requests showing up in ATMB for new, useless ones. We don’t need a pukey (which seems to be the most popular request), and we certainly don’t need animated smilies. I’ve looked at the list of animated ones that was posted earlier in this thread, and most of them can be easily expressed in words. The few that remain are so monumentally stupid that anyone who would use them should be shot in the face with a cannon. Chainsaw smilie? What the hell do you need that for?
So let’s get off the discussion of the relative merits of the smilie. I’ve already admitted that some of them have their uses, although some people abuse them, but that’s neither here nor there. Let’s leave the animated ones for the 13 year olds and their World of Warcraft fora.