While much of the Internet spent the weekend wondering which Trump associate was about to be indicted or freaking out about various sports ball home runs, there was another fervor brewing—albeit one far smaller in scope. It all kicked off when Thomas Baekdal alerted the world to the rather odd construction of Google's cheeseburger emoji:

I think we need to have a discussion about how Google's burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, while Apple puts it on top pic.twitter.com/PgXmCkY3Yc — Thomas Baekdal (@baekdal) October 28, 2017

Apple—which is in the process of rolling out new unicode 10-compliant emoji—opts for a relatively photorealistic style, putting the lettuce underneath the patty but the tomato and cheese above. By contrast, Google keeps the vegetable garnishes up top where they ought to be, but the company puts the cheese underneath the patty.

Shortly afterward, others began to note a wide variation in burger construction across different emoji implementations. WhatsApp is alone in including ketchup. HTC's design team went for a double patty approach with some visual separation courtesy of what we must assume is rather wilted lettuce. Mozilla's approach is the most bare-bones, backyard cookout style, with nothing to adorn its burger save for a slice of cheese and some sesame seeds on the bun.

A little digging in Emojipedia reveals plenty of other variations in the way emoji show up across different platforms. In addition to its burger-building faux pas, Google's emoji designer also needs a refresher course on how beer works, because a foam head can't sit on an airgap. There is little standardization among the taco emoji, either—Apple's looks the closest to something I'd actually want to eat, while Microsoft's resembles an 8-bit video game dinosaur as much as it does the Internet's favorite street food.

Emojipedia

Emojipedia

Emojipedia

Emojipedia

Emojipedia

Emojipedia

Similar discrepancies exist within the category of bento box emoji, and more than a few takeout cartons might offend superstitious users thanks to poor chopstick etiquette. We can deduce from the various burrito emoji that none were designed by someone from San Diego, because there are no fries.

This may seem trivial or a distraction from more pressing events —but it's not the first time someone has sounded this particular alarm. Last year, Andrew Cunningham drew our attention to the risk of emoji fragmentation , warning that "[a]s the language grows and becomes more expressive, the potential for misunderstanding and fragmentation increases." In other words: in some futuristic world where we by and large communicate with each other solely through emoji, users' inability to get a proper cheeseburger everywhere may only be the tiniest of miscommunications.

In the interim, someone in Mountain View might be using their search engine to learn a bit more about burger construction. Google's CEO saw Baekdal's wide-reaching tweet and expressed an interest in resolving the problem: