[Techtalk] Setting browser fonts makes buttons disappear

[Miriam English]

Carla Schroder wrote:

> 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,

It annoys me too when fonts force loading of a particular font over my 
extremely slow net connection, just because some fool designer thinks 
their sans-serif font looks spiffy, and ignores all the research showing 
that people read serif fonts much more quickly and easily than sans-serif.

I've noticed some sites (often Wordpress) don't stick to commonly 
available symbols where they could easily use those in the Number Forms 
(U+2153...), Arrows (U+2190...), and Mathematical Operators (U+2200 to 
U+22FF) parts of a normal unicode font. Instead they seem to prefer to 
use unusual characters specific to Mac fonts from the Private Use Area 
of the font (from U+E000 to U+F8FF).

When websites do stupid things that make their pages inconvenient or 
unintelligible I often use the "Contact" link to politely tell them so. 
Often it seems the reason their pages are like this is because their 
overpaid designers use expensive, high-level, specialty programs (such 
as that terrible Adobe product whose name slips my mind at the moment) 
instead of learning about how the actual web works. They expect that 
everybody will be a lazy MSWindows or Mac user who is too clueless to 
change any settings. I've found that the more wealthy the company, the 
more bloated and dysfunctional the pages, and sadly, the more remote the 
chance of getting them to change.


Akkana Peck wrote:

> 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, ← and → work in most modern web browsers, 
but not in some older or minimalist ones, whereas ← and → work 
in most old and new web browsers (even in lynx, where they get 
translated to <- and ->). A few minimalist web browsers (such as dillo 
and links) don't work with ← and →. In these unusual cases the 
browser doesn't even attempt to translate ← and →, 
which are at least readable instead of the unreadable character 
displayed by ← and →. I keep 12 web browsers on my machine for 
testing my pages. A lot of the minimalist browsers are coming back into 
wide use with the explosion in embedded Linux computers and consumer 
devices like the Raspberry Pi and similar small footprint, low energy 
computers.

browser
-------
w3m        neither, but long as name (e.g "←")
dillo      neither, but long as name
links      neither, but long as name

lynx       short translated (e.g. "<-"); long as name
netsurf    short as arrow; long as name
QtWeb      short as arrow; long as name
arora      short as arrow; long as name
firefox3   short as arrow; long as name

chrome     both as arrow
iron       both as arrow
firefox27  both as arrow
seamonkey  both as arrow

Do most fonts have the arrows? Out of interest, because this question 
has occurred to me in the past too, but I'd never followed up on it, I 
checked about 150 TTF fonts, some even from the early 90s decade, and I 
was surprised to find they all have the arrow characters in the proper 
Arrows region of the font. I've always preferred the HTML entity names 
(e.g. "←") over the numbers because I'd thought for some reason 
that the unicode numbers might not always match up, but I was wrong. In 
the web browser list above the number form displays correctly everywhere 
the short descriptive form does. It can be given as hex or decimal, of 
course.
left arrow:  &#x02190; or ←
right arrow: &#x02192; or →

I still prefer the descriptive HTML entity forms as I have great 
difficulty remembering numbers.

Cheers,

	- Miriam

-- 
If you don't have any failures then you're not trying hard enough.
  - Dr. Charles Elachi, director of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory
-----
Website: http://miriam-english.org
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