adam's grump of the day: icons in fonts (was Re: web-assets-httpd stuck in limbo?)

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2014-01-15 at 22:59 -0700, T.C. Hollingsworth wrote:

> * Another individual thought that all web authors are stupid for
> wanting to use fancy fonts and that I am wasting my time.  (He might
> be right about that last bit... :-P)

While we're doing asides, that one *does* get right on my nerves.

If anyone overrides font choices in their browser config and wonders why
an increasing number of sites - inc. github, and the wordpress admin
interface - seem to display weird hieroglyphs all over the place, it's
because of this "clever trick": web designers have decided that it's a
really good idea to abuse font rendering engines as a way to render
icons, and starting shipping icons as made-up Unicode codepoints in
their sites' custom fonts. If you override their font choice, then of
course these icons wind up as garbage, because your font does not have
them, because ICONS AREN'T FUCKING TEXT CHARACTERS, web designers.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=789788
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net