[Define New Theme] 8. Utilize Font Awesome icons where icons are needed to simplify server requests.

[callumacrae]

Required viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xXBYcWgCHA

(seriously, really good talk)

[DavidIQ]

The pending approval indicator could use some improvement as it's not really clear if it's part of the topic title or an icon. Before it was in a triangle so it was more distinct. The reported post indicator is just an exclamation mark but it is also red so it's a little more distinct.

[Pony99CA]

The pending approval indicator could use some improvement as it's not really clear if it's part of the topic title or an icon. Before it was in a triangle so it was more distinct. The reported post indicator is just an exclamation mark but it is also red so it's a little more distinct.

I agree. Let's put the triangle back.

It's probably a bit off-topic, but they should also be placed before the title to make them stand out more. It's hard to scan a list of topics looking for reported or unapproved posts when the icons are at the end of the (varying length) titles.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

Required viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xXBYcWgCHA

To summarize and save you 20+ minutes, icon fonts are bad for several reasons:

• Some browsers don't support them (like Opera Mini)
• Some browsers/operating systems without the font map icons to different things (Etsy had a half star end up like a horse head)
• They don't work well in screen readers for visually-impaired or dyslexic users (despite what the first post here claimed)
• People who replace the site's fonts with their own fonts (like a font designed for dyslexic users) get "boxes" instead of the desired icon

The recommendation was to use SVG (with a possible fallback to PNG if you want to support IE 8 or old Android browsers). Of course, there's a performance penalty, but SVG can also do a lot more than icon fonts.

Steve

[Arty]

Other points for SVG icons:

• You can use multiple colors and some other stuff
• They render identically in all browsers on all operating systems.
• Easy to customize

In my opinion rendering differences is main reason why fonts suck. Browsers render fonts using different aliasing techniques on different operating systems, making them look inconsistent. Sometimes even glyph sizes vary.

Just look at last post icon on this forum - it looks rather good on Windows, but totally blows on OSX because of different rendering methods. It looks blurred. With SVG this wouldn't happen.

[hanakin]

the biggest issue against the use of svgs is filesize and the lack for proper support of sprites

css does not allow for alteration meaning that you have to edit the svgs themselves to make changes that should be made in the css.

This is not realistic for large uses of icons

The pending approval indicator could use some improvement as it's not really clear if it's part of the topic title or an icon. Before it was in a triangle so it was more distinct. The reported post indicator is just an exclamation mark but it is also red so it's a little more distinct.

we can make it red but short of that its really anything else other than a complete design change

[DavidIQ]

Put them in a box. After all they're in a box in the topic and the icon was normally reused. Plus it's supposed to be a clickable icon, which I'm not sure if that's still the case, but the box would make it more apparent as well, I would think.

[hanakin]

Put them in a box. After all they're in a box in the topic and the icon was normally reused. Plus it's supposed to be a clickable icon, which I'm not sure if that's still the case, but the box would make it more apparent as well, I would think.

hmm something like the small paging buttons

[DavidIQ]

+1 That might work actually. Maybe get other's opinions first though to see if there's a better suggestion.

[Nicofuma]

+1