adam's grump of the day: icons in fonts (was Re: web-assets-httpd stuck in limbo?)

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Jeu 16 janvier 2014 18:13, Adam Williamson a écrit :
> On Thu, 2014-01-16 at 10:52 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
>> On Wed, 2014-01-15 at 22:31 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2014-01-15 at 22:59 -0700, T.C. Hollingsworth wrote:
>> >
>> > > * Another individual thought that all web authors are stupid for
>> > > wanting to use fancy fonts and that I am wasting my time.  (He might
>> > > be right about that last bit... :-P)
>> >
>> > While we're doing asides, that one *does* get right on my nerves.
>> >
>> > If anyone overrides font choices in their browser config and wonders
>> why
>> > an increasing number of sites - inc. github, and the wordpress admin
>> > interface - seem to display weird hieroglyphs all over the place, it's
>> > because of this "clever trick": web designers have decided that it's a
>> > really good idea to abuse font rendering engines as a way to render
>> > icons, and starting shipping icons as made-up Unicode codepoints in
>> > their sites' custom fonts. If you override their font choice, then of
>> > course these icons wind up as garbage, because your font does not have
>> > them, because ICONS AREN'T FUCKING TEXT CHARACTERS, web designers.
>>
>> It makes a lot of sense, actually. At least the symbolic icons that have
>> become prevalent in our uis share a lot of characteristics with text,
>> and can benefit from getting the same treatment as glyphs.
>
> Then get the Unicode people sign off on treating your special special
> characters as text, otherwise it's just an abuse of the system.

And, actually, Microsoft did exactly that : its special UI symbols (in
Segoe UI) have all standard codepoints @unicode.org, you can use the
Microsoft font with other apps and you can make apps written around the
Microsoft font work with FLOSS fonts that implement those codepoints.

Not-unicode is only needed for vanity symbols like company logos
unicode.org would never accept.

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot