Re: [csswg-drafts] [css-text][css-fonts] Override (Emoji) Variation Selectors

Yes, they are using their own images, because there is no way to supply a custom emoji font to browsers across platforms. They could easily honor VS-15 and VS-16, but they do not. This is a very strong indication that Twitter et al. would prefer the same behavior if they could rely on emoji fonts. The `emoji` value does not provide this.

Hardly anybody ever enters variation selectors deliberately and manually, at least not for emojis. Everybody relies on emoji picker GUIs to inject them, some of which don't do that. Then you get ❤ instead of ❤️, whereas the other heart emojis always retain their color.
I agree, though, that it's rather unlikely to encounter VS-15 in the wild, i.e. ૌ︎. Like using `text-transform` to override the case of a letter the author entered, it is a valid design decision to override the presentation style of an emoji, without having to alter the underlying data. JFTR, that's why I always preferred a solution in CSS Text like `text-transform-variant: emoji`.

However, I have shown evidence that designers sometimes want to force emojis to render in a monochrome style, so they can use CSS effects and tricks on them like they can do on any other (printing) character – or just print them better/cheaper. Take the hearts again, they would all look indistinguishable from each other if all colors just became black, but as a `text` glyph they usually feature unique hatching patterns.

iOS also very aggressively enforces its colorful emoji glyphs, by the way. This can be obtrusive, especially in the case of icon fonts (like Font Awesome) which circumvent this problem by using PUA code points. Non-standard code points can negatively affect accessibility. If CSS allowed designers to enforce `text` style with glyphs from a web font, this problem would go away, assuming their font choice would then be honored. Apple could still only support their native design of `emoji` style, i.e. not support custom `sbix` fonts for that. The situation is not much different on Android (which uses a different font format for its emojis).

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Received on Thursday, 17 August 2017 21:19:42 UTC