We just merged a large change in Mastodon's UI, upgrading the icons from FontAwesome to Material Icons, and switching from loading them as a font to inline SVGs.
This is probably a large change for people maintaining alternative themes, please send your feedback if it makes things easier or harder for you! (cc @nileane / @rolle)
Why mimic Google, when the whole idology of the Fediverse and Mastodon was anti big tech? I can't think of anything, but the thing, we're being betrayed… and no, not only for the design changes.
@gmate8 Because basing design decisions on which companies you like/dislike isn’t very smart. These are high-quality icons, Google has published them with a permissive license, and using them doesn’t tie Mastodon closer to Google.
This only impacts the React-rendered part of the app for now. If someones want to work on switch the Rails views to use those new icons, please ping me☺️
This would allow to remove FontAwesome altogether, and load far less assets!
@renchap Already testing it! SVGs can be easily replaced via CSS as long as there are paths or circles in them. It seems all of them do so this is rather straightforward upgrade. Direct SVGs instead of icon fonts make the core more maintainable in the future. Thank you for your work!
@rolle I would like to make it easier for you to work on themes, and maybe improve the support for third-party themes. I am very keen on getting your ideas/feedback here.
I would also like to switch from the current SCSS mess to something more modern, with CSS variables and CSS modules, but I can foresee issues with supporting CSS themes with those (especially modules). Could this be something you are interesting in helping with?
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