Comment by llm_nerd
10 hours ago
This is a legitimately fun piece about a bug (or extraordinary levels of inefficiency) in CoreSVG, manifested in massive computational loads to display a single SVG fallback for a colour-specified emoji.
But, isn't the heart emoji red anyways, across basically every font that has emojis? I mean, even with variations. I'm not sure what COLRv1 brings to that table for that scenario. Although maybe the special font is overkill if you really wanted to do something crazy with an emoji or text, and it seems to focus on gradients and the like.
Maybe this is why they humorously blame Claude for getting them to use that font and its affordances in the first place.
It's not solid red. It has shading.
I don't think the blog post itself is using that emoji font. The screenshot on the Noto Emoji Github page[0] doesn't look like it's using any gradients for the heart emoji, just flat shading. But it is using gradients for some of the other emojis (e.g. the croissant), and obviously the SVG fallback is all or nothing, not per-glyph.
[0] https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-emoji
You need to look closer; the heart emoji has a flat fill, but a gradient in its outline stroke, from lighter-than-red near the top, to darker-than-red on the bottom.
As a bit more on this, until this piece I was oblivious to this COLRv1 thing, which is adding more of SVG-style functionality to already vector font standards.
https://nabla.typearture.com/
https://developer.chrome.com/blog/colrv1-fonts
My natural cynicism is to ask "should a font really do this?" But I guess it's pretty neat.