[Techtalk] Setting browser fonts makes buttons disappear

[Akkana Peck]

Carla Schroder writes:
> The attached screenshot is an example of what I see on Twitter.

Yep, that's the same thing I was talking about. If you magnify them,
you'll see that those little boxes each have four hex digits in them
-- they're what you see for characters your font doesn't have.
For instance, the one next to "Home" says F0 53.

I'm not sure of the best way to find out what unicode F053 is --
I tried gucharmap but it doesn't seem to have a "search by unicode"
function, so I googled unicode f053 and got
http://www.utf8icons.com/character/61523/UTF-8-character
which says that it's part of the "Private Use Unicode subset" (good
going, Twitter, that sounds nice and portable) and displays as a
script S in most fonts.

And indeed, in my font, Twitter shows a big script-S there. But if I
enable "allow pages to use other fonts" I see a little house.

According to the DOM inspector, Twitter asks for this font spec:
"Helvetica Neue",Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif I don't have the first
two, and in Arial and every other font I tested on my system, F053
is a script S. All I can figure is that they're somehow using a
web-font version of Helvetica Neue and that font has the little
house icon for that code point.  I don't know how to verify that.
None of the top Google image search results for "Helvetica Neue"
shows the little house. And why wouldn't it just fall back to Arial
or sans-serif, anyway?

> I swear Web designers are all on drugs.

I agree. Is it really that hard to make a little house gif that will
work for everyone? And why would you use a character that normally
displays as script S for "Home"?

        ...Akkana