Why are smileys counted as "images" in posts?

[grsbanks]

Technically, they are images:

Code:

I recently ran into a problem with smileys / emoticons / emojis ( or whatever you want to
call them ) when I was replying to a post in the forums. Specifically, if I have more than 10 of
eg. these " <img src="images/smilies/smile.gif" style="vertical-align: middle;" border="0"
alt="Smile" title="Smile" /> " then I get an error message like the following when trying to
post a message or reply :<br />