Pixietown

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of thing you could fix with Web Plat Tests, because the Unicode Consortium mints new emojis every year, so the test is outdated as soon as you write it, and doesn't solve Safari version fragmentation.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.

@nolan last time I was looking at emojis and fonts it looked to me like the main problem is that there are two or three different standards for how emojis can be encoded inside a font and rendered, so you can't just provide a font to your website viewers and be done with it. You would need 1 font for windows, 1 font for Mac, etc etc.

Is that still the case ?

Iirc I was trying to figure out how to get a consistent emoji look across all platforms and it seemed like tools to do that by constructing one of each type of font from source images or from a source font don't exist (well, besides using images like you said)

If I understand correct this is actually an OS font rendering thing not a browser thing ? All the sub pixel rendering stuff for fonts being different, and different mega corps each building thier own separate way to do emojis

@forestjohnson If your goal is to have all emoji look exactly the same on all platforms then yes native emoji will not work. There are lots of famous examples here like the debate of squirt gun vs real gun: https://blog.emojipedia.org/emoji-design-convergence-review-2018-2026/

It has gotten better (faces used to have very different expressions) but yes you are right that if you want perfect consistency you need your own fonts. And yes this is more of an OS issue than a browser issue, aside from Firefox which ships their own Twemoji font.

@nolan the default windows emoji are just soooo ugly ,

wait so it looks like twemoji is the one where they try to make all the different fonts for each OS but w/ the same source emojis right ? I think I had tried to embed that in my site somehow but it wasn't working at the time. I'll have to read more about it.

Right now I'm just letting the OS do whatever and letting it be ugly on windows, I guess cuz I can't be bothered to do an image emoji filter of some kind