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by grogenaut 3175 days ago
They're using SVG
2 comments

They have purposely disabled being able to select text (outside of the SVG graphics) by literally doing this in CSS:

    * {
        user-select: none;
    }
The user-select: none; is intended for places where interaction with an element (e.g., drag and drop, clicking, sliding) is required and text selection should not occur. You might use it discretely on a HTML button.

Blanket banning of text selection is a habit I've seen with developers who live in a touchscreen-heavy bubble, and who feel that users have no reason to select text at all unless explicitly enabled by the developer.

> As citizens of the technology era, there is an undeniable need for optimal clarity in our writing.

There, I copied that quote from their website (by disabling the relevant CSS); one example of a totally valid reason for wanting to select text.

I've noticed that I'm unable to select text in facebook posts in the browser on my phone. Quite irritating.
Right, the symbols are SVG but not rest of the text.
They're using SVG because support for these non-standard punctuation varies across browsers and OS's, so its safest to use an image.

Many sites presenting informational content about unicode content do the same, as they cannot presume the user will see the unicode symbols rendered natively in their browser.

We're talking about all of the regular text on the site, not those dozen symbols.