rendering and verification of glyphs

I find this to be a problem generally and I am surprised to see this  
in the CSS spec. Or am I misunderstanding something?

See: http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Test/CSS2.1/current/t1202-counter-09- 
b.htm

I am on a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4.9. With Firefox 2.0.0.4, if I  
display this page, I see either two rows of question marks, or two  
rows of glyphs that are made of squares with a 4-digit hex number in  
them, which is obviously how FF is displaying unknown Unicode code  
points.

With a debug build of the Firefox trunk (to be FF 3), I see only the  
hex-square glyphs.

With Opera, I see just squares.

In all these cases, the test would seem to be passing, as it says  
"The following two lines should look the same:".

Should all of these tests be passing?

Is the CSS saying something about what we should be seeing here? Or  
is it just saying that, whatever one sees, one should see two  
identical rows of them?

The latter would make sense. The former opens up big questions. How  
can a visual comparison within a web page, such as this, verify  
correct glyph rendering? I am working on tests that involve image  
comparisons to get around this limitation, but I am not sure that  
would be desirable here.

Can anyone speak to the intent of this and similar tests?

thanx - ray

Received on Tuesday, 3 July 2007 01:48:20 UTC