Re: Flash of unstyled text/Flash of unfonted content

On 10/14/2009 2:52 PM, Richard Fink wrote:
> If glyphs critical to an understanding of the page are missing - or, to look
> at the more pessimistic flip side - glyphs are missing that might lead to a
> *misunderstanding* of the page, then the page should fail in a very obvious
> way.
> Currently, I believe, the UA will display question marks in place of missing
> glyphs.
> Is this sufficient? I don't know. I'd like to hear from some implementors on
> this.
> They might be a few steps ahead...

Looking at some pages on Wikipedia [1] in Firefox 3.5, I get boxes with 
the Unicode code points of characters as fallback for those that I don't 
have a font for. So, apparently, at least one vendor has considered 
this. I don't know how you get your average user to understand what 
happened though without going into an explanation...

On an aside: It would be nice if there were some font with glyphs for 
every character of which chunks could be downloaded by the browser as 
needed. That would ensure that all characters could at least be 
displayed (if not optimally) as long as the user were online. I suspect 
that such an endeavor would significantly increase use of characters 
that are avoided for fear of a missing glyph.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ugaritic_alphabet

Received on Thursday, 22 October 2009 04:52:48 UTC