Color fonts on Google Fonts
material.io
material.io
The Arabic scripts look amazing! Gradient support is bigger than color support imo
And of course, web browsers and text rendering become increasingly more complex and expensive to build/maintain because Google single-handedly decided it.
Why does this need to be a new spec? Nobody is going to use it for body text. If someone wants those ugly 3D titles, they could use SVG or Canvas.
One of the examples in the OP was colored arabic text for education. That’s an extremely narrow use case which could be entirely supported with custom rendering via SVG, Canvas, WebGL, etc.
This isn’t the end of the world or anything, but it’s annoying and frustrating to see as someone who thinks there should be more browsers and operating systems than the ones Google makes.
They could but then it would be less accessible for screen readers or bots that want to scrape text from a web page for indexing or anything else. Your user agent can also determine if rendering those "ugly 3D titles" is the right thing to do or not, so you could have a plugin that stops them from being rendered.
> there should be more browsers and operating systems than the ones Google makes
These fonts work fine in Firefox.
Screen readers can read SVG, and ARIA exists for adding accessibility to things like Canvas or WebGL (see: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...).
> These fonts work fine in Firefox.
They in fact do not work at all in Firefox (or any other browser besides Chrome/Edge). If you go to fonts.google.com, they work because that page uses a custom renderer for them.
See the duck demo here (need to scroll down): https://developers.googleblog.com/2022/09/updates-to-emoji-n...
The duck is invisible on Safari on my iPhone and in Firefox (104.0.1) on my desktop
as noted by jfk13 below, you have to enable `gfx.font_rendering.colr_v1.enabled` in about:config
Makes me think of Fontemon:
https://www.coderelay.io/fontemon.html#player
https://github.com/mmulet/code-relay/blob/main/markdown/HowI...
Perhaps combining this COLRv1 spec and the prior art it's doable today!
And even if these fonts don't hit, people will make more!
Couldn't the developer download and host the font locally instead of calling back to Google's servers to load the font?
The person claiming Google Fonts would be "illegal" in Germany is misinformed.
It is simply considered best practice to self-host Google Fonts now and you are absolutely safe doing so.
The basics of privacy law is basically don't violate the privacy of your users for no good reason. There is no technical justification to use a Google's third party service for fonts, especially as that potentially allows Google to track users. (You could still use Google's hosting if you were to get prior user consent though. Just have a fallback font. That wouldn't be worth it though.)
So yes, you can use third party services and CDNs on your website but it needs to be either technically necessary or you need for user consent beforehand.
So far, the courts have only selectively enforced it against Google, but any website which is controlled by an American entity, hosted by an American entity, or which embeds content controlled by or hosted in the US is de jure illegal under GDPR because it means an American court could theoretically get a warrant for EU citizens' IP addresses.
If "necessary" or "unavoidable" is the test, then it gets really murky — is it really necessary for your ISP to buy wholesale IP transit from another ISP when they could build out their own infra instead? It's entirely avoidable for them to peer at IXes for more economical / efficient routing — and those IXes have switches and routers operated by third parties which can see your traffic — so is it illegal for them to offload your traffic there as well?
https://www.golem.de/news/landgericht-muenchen-einbindung-vo...
https://t3n.de/news/google-fonts-illegal-urteil-dsgvo-144769...
https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000138472819/datenschutzan...
All these sources lead back to this verdict:
A German resident that wants to access Google or any other US site is fine. The packets are allowed to exit the EU because that's what they asked for.
Using Google Fonts means that your EU users have to access Google, a US company, in order to read your site. Most browsers are configured to do this automatically and opting-out of that would be time-consuming and break the whole web. And using Google Fonts gives Google the unprecedented ability to snoop on third-party sites. Yes, they have promised not to do this, but their host government has also promised to break Google's promise for them.
Taking that same logic and applying it to intermediary routing, the only time in which you'd have a GDPR export case is if you tried to access an EU website and your traffic was rerouted into the US or China. Which actually happens way more often than it should.
What 'snooping' is happening during a CSS import?
Google promises explicitly to not do this, and I believe them. However, they can still be compelled by law enforcement to break their own promise, and that's what the EU is reasonably angry about.
Also Browsers should send exactly the same headers when in image and page contexts - if I want to view an image it means I want to view an image on its own and there should be nothing the site can do about it.
I have don't so for multiple bigger customers, the law departments were fine with that.
Personally, I think hotlinking should not be considered leaking of PII. Setting a link should not imply endorsement, and embedding an image or an iframe should not create a derived work. The website just gives instructions to the user's browser. I could change the font myself or open another window with the embedded image next to the website, it is merely a convenience. But lawmakers try to put everything in the mold of yesterdays technologies, which is why we cannot have nice things.
Now, how to deal with the fact that Google does get your IP and/or can identify you with cookies? Just ban profiling. It's not so hard.
https://rewis.io/urteile/urteil/lhm-20-01-2022-3-o-1749320/
Therefor selfhosting a Google Font is the way if you still want to use them.
It seems that if this was legitimately useful (instead of just one more thing competitors are obligated to spend money on implementing) we'd have seen SVG fonts used for it already.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/typography/opentype/spec/sv...
https://helpx.adobe.com/fonts/using/ot-svg-color-fonts.html
"OpenType-SVG is a font format in which an OpenType font has all or just some of its glyphs represented as SVG (scalable vector graphics) artwork. This allows the display of multiple colors and gradients in a single glyph. Because of these features, we also refer to OpenType-SVG fonts as “color fonts”.
OpenType-SVG fonts allow text to be shown with these graphic qualities, while still allowing it to be edited, indexed, or searched. They may also contain OpenType features that allow glyph substitution or alternate glyph styles."
Google Chrome teams refuses to implement SVG-in-OT. Instead, they wanted to implemented their COLRv1. https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=306078...
So this seems like a good thing overall. Note that Firefox doesn't support it at this time.
Where does Mozilla's revenue come from? Are they an impartial 3rd party?
"every day". as in "each day". The word "everyday" is an adjective.
It's not something I would bring up in a forum, absent context or someone asking about it, but I'd definitely correct it in formal writing.
Joining words to one compound word is pretty much the example of language evolution.
That seems like a contradiction. If it were clearly wrong, most people would notice. The fact that they don't surely implies that it isn't very clear.
Descriptivism is "shush, if people are using it this way then it's correct".
"So this is pretty cool, but it turns out that the contextual substitution lookup type is really powerful. This is because the table that it references can be itself, which means it can be recursive."
[…]
"So thats a pretty powerful virtual machine. I think the above is sufficient to prove Turing complete-ness."
One could, if so inclined, build a complete COLRv1 font parser in PostScript.
So it's not like this would empower people to do ugly web design that they couldn't already do.
Per your point, I prefer CSS animations to having a blink tag, and people have managed to avoid using those too much the last 20 years.
I wonder if anyone else remembers this; perhaps there's an opportunity to document/archive something about typography which might otherwise get forgotten.
The expectation that every user get's exactly the same experience regardless of what browser they're using has held the development of great user experiences on the web back for about two decades now. There's no reason why you shouldn't deliver a better experience for some users if their browser is more capable.
Design a working minimal app. It'll probably be close to a plain HTML and CSS site that's rendered on a server. Then add in things that make it nicer to use while checking that the browser supports that feature so you don't break anything if it doesn't. Build up to a really nice experience. Progressively enhance the usr experience. This is literally how websites were built 20 years ago, but then developers got lazy and only wrote apps for the lowest common denominator, which meant any new features in browsers rarely good used, and at the same time slightly unusual browsers like Lynx got abandoned entirely. It really annoys me.
For example this page works fine in Safari
https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Nabla
Both MacOS and iOS.
Is it literally infinite, or is it a very large number? As far as I understand it, variable fonts are defined by ranges of finite length, and all CSS color spaces I know of are finite too. I'm being roughly a little pedantic, but mostly just wondering why they wrote it this way, and if I'm missing something. Big fans of Rob Lowe maybe?
Still, it's interesting to see that there's still room for innovation in the font space, even if I'm not in the target demographic.
3E A DESIGNER!
E YOUR DESKTOP/LAPTO
https://developers.google.com/fonts/faq#how_do_i_contact_goo...
Anyway, hopefully Firefox will add support for COLRv1, at least for some platforms. FreeType has it apparently.
Search engine parsing: image "alt" tag should be equivalent again.
Copy-Paste: Arguably not better with a font. A raster image will be the same regardless of where you copy-paste it. A logo implemented with a font will only look the same when copy-pasting between applications that are aware of that font. If every company creates their own font-logo, it will just break copy-paste everywhere except their domain.
If I embed an image in some text, like `foo <img alt="bar"> baz` then I doubt any search engine can find this for the search query `"foo bar baz"`.
I would like to copy and past text-like things as text, without having to copy and paste images. When I want to copy and paste text, I rarely care about matching exact styles. In cases where I want the exact style, I can just screenshot.
The most obvious examples are emoji which may need hundreds of strokes in many colors to be properly colored as we see them in most places (that aren't HN). Many emoji were rendered as bitmap images on many platforms to be able to get the colors correct prior to font support for color fonts.
And then people who need it will use OCR to translate into text. Which won't always work very well.
More specifically:
<div class="spicy" contenteditable spellcheck="false">hackernews</div>
This has made me extremely averse to them, to the point where I simply avoid sites using them.
And now they add color...
The maximum size at which 1440p works is 30".
The maximum size at which 2160p (4K) works is 40".
If you’re using a larger size than the ones given above for a given resolution, you will have less than 96dpi, leading to fonts that break or become too thin, and icons that will be less recognizable.
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P.S.: The same can be said for colors. While any CRT in the 90s but even early LCDs like the Fujitsu SIEMENS P17-2 from 2004 (now 30€ on eBay) gets 100% sRGB, full 8-bit colors at exactly 96dpi, many gaming monitors don’t even manage this today. There are still gaming monitors, 1080p at 30" or even 32" using 6-bit panels with FRC that barely hit 70% sRGB on sale today.