User:Bob Jed

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Unicode glyphs in wikipedia articles

Wikipedia went all-in on unicode a while back, and web browser and javascript people are on that bandwagon too. There is actually quite a lot wrong with unicode, both in design and in execution, but let's just highlight one problem that's pertinent to wikipedia's use:

Giving only unicode codepoints moves the job of representing the thing exampled away from wikipedia proper, and into the unicode font that may or may not be available to the browser. Since it's end user-side you cannot assume its codepoint coverage is going to be complete, or even upgradable.

In other words, if no sufficiently full-featured unicode font is present in the visitor's browser, many articles display lots of little square boxes instead of whatever it is that's supposed to be shown.

This is not an argument against all unicode use. It points at a weakness in the use of unicode exclusively, as wikipedia tends to do. It shouldn't be too hard to make sure wikipedia's servers contain a complete unicode font, then generate little glyph-pictures for serving to the browser regardless of how fully featured the unicode font at the client end is.

Now detecting little boxes on the client side and substituting with glyph-pictures may be error-prone, but a good case can be made that an encyclopaedia should give a full representation* and not out-source some of the representing to the user font. So... a switch to enable glyph-pictures perhaps? Wikipedia already went big on the javascript with the (IMO much more annoying) "user-friendlier" editor. So a simple switch to replace codepoints that may not render client-side with server-side-generated glyph pictures should be a no-brainer.

• Excluding formatting specifics, as HTML specifically allows that to differ among different user-agents, ie web browsers.