Unicode vs. icons

[wking]

@VictorBjelkholm suggested switching from Unicode to icons (for anything with questionable font support?). I'm not clear on the tradeoffs, but it seems like font support will asymptotically approach not being a problem, and in the meantime folks missing U+1F5EA (TWO SPEECH BUBBLES, like me on my phone) won't suffer too greatly. But if there is some UI consensus on this sort of thing, or if we just want to pick an approach for this repo, we can sort that out in this issue.

[victorb]

In general it's easier to use icons since you know they'll look the same across everywhere you use them, while fonts and unicode depends on the environment. Also, we have a higher degree of freedom of what to use/show with icons.

[wking]

On Thu, Dec 08, 2016 at 08:16:53AM -0800, ᴠɪᴄᴛᴏʀ ʙᴊᴇʟᴋʜᴏʟᴍ wrote:

In general it's easier to use icons since you know they'll look the same across everywhere you use them, while fonts and unicode depends on the environment.

If we have concerns about font support for a given character (e.g. no U+1F5EA, TWO SPEECH BUBBLES, on my phone), we could provide a font with the subset of glyphs we need. But in the absence of someone chiming in with “I really miss the double-bubble (or whatever) on my phone”, I don't think that's worth the trouble, when even phones will presumably support the glyphs we need out of the box in the next few years.

Beyond support (i.e. do you get a glyph at all), controlling the font/icon lets you set the style. I don't think we care what the double-bubble or other glyphs looks like, as long as they're recognizably a double-bubble (or whatever) and not orders of magnitude different in width. Both seem like reasonably safe bets regardless of which font a user uses to provide the glyphs.

Also, we have a higher degree of freedom of what to use/show with icons.

True, but I expect Unicode to cover any icons we need. I think we're more likely to have trouble with Bengali issue titles 1 or some such than we are to have trouble with support for UI icons.