Neat! I tried my luck with unicode symbols once because they scale nicely as well, but many browsers just desecrate them.
⏪ ⏩ are two examples, while these ► are pretty plain. Not that I don't like the specific designs, but the customization destroys any chance of their use if you want to keep consistent looks. In chrome they are on a blue background. I think other browsers might display them differently. Would be cool to have a neutral design that could be adjusted by font color.
> In chrome they are on a blue background. I think other browsers might display them differently.
FYI, Unicode has two symbols, xFE0E and xFE0F, which explicitly requests the previous character to display as either a "text" (i.e. a solid vector) or "emoji" representation, respectively. These are well supported in browsers.
I did not know that, this is pretty cool. Strange how browsers select the standard representation between text and emoji. Seems a bit random for some symbols.
The Unicode standard defines which glyphs should get an emoji rendering by default. It is quite random. I think they made a mistake in applying this to existing symbols (like the media player buttons above) but that ship has sailed.
Not my work, can't take credit. Here is how the author created those: http://67ekjdzqxmmmuiv.codecalm.net/editor.html and all icons are created with a line, an arc and a circle. I found this repo linked on a polish website and figured this community can benefit from it. I also pinged the author to join and answer a few questions you guys have here.
Course HN does just fine without Emojis. I can only imagine the amount of downvoting that would ensue. I could see maybe some being useful like the arrows.
Edit:
By the looks of it the emojis that are meant to be signs work. The ones that are actual faces do not.
> Course HN does just fine without Emojis. I can only imagine the amount of downvoting that would ensue.
You're probably right on the downvotes but I do wonder why. Is there anything inherently bad about emoji or is HN sometimes just a counterculture for the sake of being a counterculture?
I may just be old and bitter but I've never found emojis to actually help in commentary and are actively distracting when people already have established norms in communicating in a particular language as to my eyes it becomes adding a second language where there was already one. There's no rock solid definition for any emoji that has been normalized with a universally accepted dictionary especially when it is intermixed in another language that has its own complex grammar rules. As a single character statement of a symbol e.g. 'thumbs up' it works well, but that's the limit of emoji usefulness.
As someone who works in tech I'm always aware of the hundreds of completely overloaded terms I have to use and redefine on the fly but I also have the structure of the language I am using to provide context clues to have my actual intent, meaning, and purpose of said writing last to any reader including myself five years from now. I have so little confidence in effectively using emoji to actually provide expression in a way that is persistent to myself in five years that I abstain from it entirely. In small communities of people I have seen emoji-esque symbols exist (slack/forums/odd IRC emoticons) but it is because that is part of the living culture of a particular community and has to be taught to each person that chooses to join a community. I feel that is fine because there is a context to it and an established rule of use that allows it to enrich the conversation, but on a site like HN where it's a lot of people coming together it seems like trying to put a wall up for communication. A simple example is well is most HN commenters fully understanding what a line that starts with '>' usually referring to a quote of a prior post that they want to highlight in particular. It is a useful shorthand compared to writing out longhand 'In your post you have written many things but I particularly want to respond to your comment that reads "x to y".' You have to learn that and it's overhead.
I also depending on theming/font of the emoji characters themselves can sometimes take the wrong tonal interpretation even to me. Some seem sarcastic, some seem more intimate, some seem hostile, even though the underlying emoji is supposed to be neutral in tone. This is another reason why I avoid them, as I don't want to give off the wrong impression based on that.
For a discussion forum like HN I'd say that emojis are generally harmful to making sure that the conversations last longer than the moment they were written in case it becomes useful tomorrow.
> For a discussion forum like HN I'd say that emojis are generally harmful to making sure that the conversations last longer than the moment they were written in case it becomes useful tomorrow.
I just had a horrible nightmare vision of having to debug a code repository entirely commented with emojis...
<shakes away>
But I agree with you, words work fine and, especially as full sentences, are less ambiguous than cutesy symbols.
I think it falls under the "this is not reddit" mantra which I am okay with. I rather see the type of discourse we have on here than just 1 word / 1 emoji responses.
Moderators, please, act quick and update the rules to forbid color on comments! Make emojis restricted, too, just for those cases where letters are insufficient.
There seems to be a connection though. This project tabler/tabler-icons is part of Tabler, which features FeatherIcons: https://preview.tabler.io/icons.html.
Not saying there's anything wrong here, for all I know it might be the same author on both projects. Taking a closer look, it might even be the case that tabler-icons is just a rebranding of FeatherIcons.
I take it to mean that they're composed well: there's a balanced and sensible spacing/padding, the lines are a good weight, they are easy on the eye, there's a consistent look and feel between all of them etc etc.
For instance, I could mangle some SVG icons and while you could scale them to an infinite size.. you wouldn't want to use them ;)
> Does this make you vulnerable to code coming downstream from this repo in the future?
The command is a standard way to install a module and save that specific version in package.json. By default I believe it's "^x.x.x", which allows patch versions that increment the last number when explicitly updating - otherwise re/install will always get that specific version.
It's no less (or more) secure than any other dependency. The last vulnerability that I heard about was the ability for modules for run arbitrary commands, for example from the pre/post-install step. If I recall correctly, they added an optional way to disable this, but many modules make use of it for compiling native code, etc.
So - I'd say yes, installing any dependency will make you vulnerable to code coming downstream. However, an SVG icon library with little to no executable code can probably be considered low risk.
How so? I would think it puts its files in a publicly accessible path. That means if it puts executable code there (python,php,js whatever)
in a future release it allows for a server-takeover.
Aside from pre/postinstall scripts, I imagine the SVG and/or CSS files gets copied into a folder of static assets.
Depending on how that's done - manual import or part of a build step; specifying file extensions or not; how assets are served, etc. - that could be "vulnerable to code coming downstream".
What benefit would that have vs SVG? It strikes me as cumbersome if you wanted to quickly add icons to an existing project, plus your ability to style with CSS would be limited compared to inline SVG.
⏪ ⏩ are two examples, while these ► are pretty plain. Not that I don't like the specific designs, but the customization destroys any chance of their use if you want to keep consistent looks. In chrome they are on a blue background. I think other browsers might display them differently. Would be cool to have a neutral design that could be adjusted by font color.
But anyway, thank you for your work!