[Techtalk] Setting browser fonts makes buttons disappear

[Akkana Peck]

Carla Schroder writes:
> 
> O Great Techtalkers, WTF is up with buttons that disappear when you
> don't check 'allow pages to choose their own fonts' in Firefox? Two
> notorious examples are Twitter and the Wordpress dashboard. It's really
> fun trying to work in Wordpress with all those weird little
> Chinese-looking glyphs instead of buttons. I want MY fonts dammit,

I use that setting too. I don't think I've seen buttons disappear --
where on Twitter do you see this? If you give a specific example I
might be able to figure out what's up. But I do, quite often, see
photo gallery pages where instead of Next and Previous buttons with
arrows or some other indication as to what they should do, I see
obscure symbols or those 2-by-2 matrices of digits indicating a
missing unicode character. I assume that's because the page is using
some obscure right-arrow and left-arrow characters that exist only
in some fonts, and I'm not letting them switch to that font.

For instance, on Zillow.com (real estate sites are particularly bad
about this, plus they always require javascript from six different
domains) if you manage to get to the "show larger photos", the Next
button is a white outline that looks like a fire hydrant, or maybe
a battery, on a grey square; the Previous button is a white diamond.
Like this: http://imgur.com/IxVmKG9
I can't seem to find a way to get firebug's DOM inspector to tell me
what characters those are; it says it's a <span> with nothing inside
it, and the CSS rules aren't enlightening.

It took me a long time to figure out that I should click on anything
that's vaguely to the right of the image, even if it has some weird
symbol on it, because it's probably a next button. But some photo-
sharing sites put the buttons below the image instead of at the
right and left (flickr used to do that and I think Apple's image
sharing site still does), and then I just have to click randomly
trying to guess which button might be "next".

If I change the "allow sites to use their own fonts" setting, then
the diamond and fire hydrant change to > and < characters. But
I'm sure they're subtly different and more beautiful in some way,
visible only to professional web designers, compared to the normal
ascii > and < characters that would have worked in every font.

That brings up another question. In my own photo galleries (a little
PHP script I wrote), I use ← and → for the
Next/Prev buttons. I always assumed that works regardless of font,
but maybe that's not a good assumption and I should use < and
>. Anyone know?

        ...Akkana