Re: [css-fonts] new generic font 'emoji'

Hi John

in terms of code-point coverage, don’t platforms already fallback to a font that can cover those code-points?  It would seem that expanding the generic font list to suggest code-point coverage is heading in a new direction, and opens cans of worms (that I will not attempt to open here!).

But…generic fonts do concern themselves with ‘style’ (in the artistic sense, not the formal style-sheet sense), and emojis do raise the profile of an interesting style problem.  When you ask for emojis (by code point), do you want animated or static, uncolored or colored emojis?  See the table at <http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/tr51-1d.html#Design_Guidelines>, for example.

Colored fonts are again getting attention, but for normal text I think the author will deliberately select a colored font if they want that effect (with a fallback to generic).  For emojis, platforms may well offer colored and uncolored, animated or static, variations of emojis, but not under font names consistent across platforms — which is exactly the problem generic font names attempt to solve.

Thoughts?


On Aug 21, 2014, at 0:57 , John Daggett <jdaggett@mozilla.com> wrote:

> 
> Currently CSS defines a set of five generic fonts [1]:
> 
>  serif, sans-serif, monospace, cursive, fantasy
> 
> I'd like to propose expanding this to include a generic font for
> emoji characters:
> 
>  emoji
> 
> The 'emoji' value would map to whatever emoji font is available on a
> given platform (e.g. Apple Color Emoji, Segoe UI Emoji, Noto Color
> Emoji).
> 
> Part of the motivation here is that when Unicode defined a mapping
> of emoji characters into Unicode, it explicitly unified some of
> these with existing symbol codepoints. If an author relies on system
> font fallback to choose a font there's no guarantee an emoji font
> will be prioritized over a symbol font, since it's difficult for a
> user agent to distinguish between symbol vs. emoji usage. Specifying
> the 'emoji' value in a fontlist would prioritize the use of color
> glyphs for all codepoints covered by the emoji font.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> John Daggett
> Mozilla Japan
> 
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-fonts/#generic-font-families
> 

David Singer
Manager, Software Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Friday, 22 August 2014 21:01:13 UTC