> And given that ẞ only made it into German orthography in 2017
As a character it was proposed first in 2004 and encoded in 2007.
> I bet there are loads of fonts that still don't support the character and having double-S is better than nothing.
Oh yes, of course. But those then don’t display „SS“ instead of „ẞ“ but either a missing glyph or a glyph from a fallback font.
> Edit: Kind of proud how I am using css-transforms and a few more CSS hacks to get it working on my mom's website in the title: https://gutshaeuser-ostpreussen.de/gutshaus
That’s a nice hack! Congratulations.
(gutshäuser-ostpreußen.de or rather xn--gutshuser-ostpreuen-1tb6g.de is still free, if you’ll want a new challenge. But I advise against using an IDNA domain with an „ß“ for e-mail. Evergreen browser are now updated for the IDNA2008 algorithm, which supports the „ß“, but for a long time first IDNA2003 didn’t support „ß“ in internationalised domains, then browser didn’t update to IDNA2008 until late in 201x. And other internet software like mail clients are even more behind. Sadly.)
There is an old proposal for the CSS WG floating around to enable custom alterations for text-transform or even custom transformations, since it is useful in other languages. That then would be a non-hacky way:
As a character it was proposed first in 2004 and encoded in 2007.
> I bet there are loads of fonts that still don't support the character and having double-S is better than nothing.
Oh yes, of course. But those then don’t display „SS“ instead of „ẞ“ but either a missing glyph or a glyph from a fallback font.
> Edit: Kind of proud how I am using css-transforms and a few more CSS hacks to get it working on my mom's website in the title: https://gutshaeuser-ostpreussen.de/gutshaus
That’s a nice hack! Congratulations.
(gutshäuser-ostpreußen.de or rather xn--gutshuser-ostpreuen-1tb6g.de is still free, if you’ll want a new challenge. But I advise against using an IDNA domain with an „ß“ for e-mail. Evergreen browser are now updated for the IDNA2008 algorithm, which supports the „ß“, but for a long time first IDNA2003 didn’t support „ß“ in internationalised domains, then browser didn’t update to IDNA2008 until late in 201x. And other internet software like mail clients are even more behind. Sadly.)
There is an old proposal for the CSS WG floating around to enable custom alterations for text-transform or even custom transformations, since it is useful in other languages. That then would be a non-hacky way:
https://wiki.csswg.org/ideas/at-text-transform?rev=145951992...
https://specs.rivoal.net/css-custom-tt/
I first asked the CSS WG back in 2011 and they already knew about the problem. That proposal sadly still doesn’t seem to go anywhere.