Re: Flash of unstyled text/Flash of unfonted content

On Thursday, October 22, 2009, 6:51:56 AM, Patrick wrote:

PG> 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.

PG> Looking at some pages on Wikipedia [1] in Firefox 3.5, I get boxes with
PG> the Unicode code points of characters as fallback for those that I don't
PG> have a font for.

That page on Ugaritic is a prime use case for downloadable fonts. Its a dead language. The average reader on a desktop may well not have a font installed that covers it. The average reader on a mobile device almost certainly does not. (I happen to have a suitable font installed but I happen to have an interest in ancient languages so am not really in the "average user" demographic there).

The content authors would doubtless really like everyone who visits the page to see what is after all the primary subject of the page, correctly. 

And the average reader will never need that font again as soon as they navigate away from that page.


PG>  So, apparently, at least one vendor has considered 
PG> this. I don't know how you get your average user to understand what 
PG> happened though without going into an explanation...

I agree that little boxes of some sort are a bit of a help - clearly there is something missing - but do not really allow the sense of the article to be understood.

  Other letters look similar as well: ?? Ho resembles its assumed Greek cognate E, while ??  Wo, ?? Pu, and ??  Thanna are similar to Greek Y, Π, and Σ turned on their sides.

That sentence absolutely requires the shapes to be displayed inline.

PG> On an aside: It would be nice if there were some font with glyphs for 
PG> every character of which chunks could be downloaded by the browser as 
PG> needed. 

The day of the single mega Unicode-font-to-rule-them-all has long passed. it was never really feasible on the desktop; its impractical on mobile, and Unicode has since grown such that some font formats can't represent it all in one font even if it was desirable.


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




-- 
 Chris Lilley                    mailto:chris@w3.org
 Technical Director, Interaction Domain
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG

Received on Thursday, 22 October 2009 11:12:28 UTC