I can't believe it's 2026 and I'm *still* dealing with detecting unsupported emojis in browsers, because of course browser emoji support is still all over the place: https://github.com/nolanlawson/emoji-picker-element/issues/514
We will colonize Mars before browsers figure out how to draw a smiley face.
I remember back in 2020 when I wrote emoji-picker-element, I was sure that using native emoji fonts was the way to go, and that I was skating toward where the puck was going. *Surely* we'd figure out all these font problems in no time, right?
And yet, things are actually worse now:
- Windows still won't show country flags
- Chromium still won't fix this for us https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40766658
- Safari still ties emoji to OS updates
- Firefox's bet on Twemoji went very south: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1796880
I'd like to say that this is something for standards to solve, but it's actually basically just browser bugs that the browsers themselves could fix but don't bother (likely because any web app that matters just ships their own bloated emojis-as-images anyway).
It's also unfortunately not the kind of thing you could fix with Web Plat Tests, because the Unicode Consortium mints new emojis every year, so the test is outdated as soon as you write it, and doesn't solve Safari version fragmentation.
@nolan web is all over the place
every time I'm trying to build anything slightly non trivial, like a grid of cards, I have to deal with non trivial interactions and guess which combination of align/justify/content/items gets me there. It's so infuriating.
Like I just learned about vmin and vmax unit which had to be invented because mobile vendors love to jack everyone's code.
Safari IOS not implementing full screen for some insane reason
No standard way of uploading folders?? (webkitdirectory)
I used to hate JS/TS website bloat but now that I've written websites I finally understand: websites are in general piles of well-tested workaround fixes for weird unpredictable behaviour, needin a lot of JS to taper over the holes and ensure same behaviour across the board.
Like, how insane can it be that only recently has JS gotten a standardized way of IMPORTING??
what.
hot take: the web needs an HTML 6 and JS 2 to update default behaviour and fix these issues.
@diegovsky The web is slowly trending in the direction of "HTML6" with things like "invokers" (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Popover_API/Using_interest_invokers), declarative shadow DOM (https://web.dev/articles/declarative-shadow-dom), CSS anchor positioning (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Anchor_positioning), and other mechanisms that let you do basic stuff with pure HTML/CSS and no JS. It might take a couple years for the framework world to catch up though.