Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
The reason why <font face="Symbol"> ever “worked” in HTML documents was the sloppy implementation of browsers—they applied a font without even checking whether the font actually contains the characters in content. So instead of deciding that <font face="Symbol">a</font> cannot possibly be rendered using the Symbol font as requested, because that font does not contain the letter “a,” they just used the font, letting it display whatever happens to be there in the code position for “a” (Greek letter small alpha “α” in this case).
This sounds like Jukka expects browsers to analyze the glyph assigned in the font to the code position for 'a' and decline to display it if it doesn't look enough like an 'a' (rejecting, for example, Greek 'α'). I'm not sure that is a reasonable expectation.
-- Doug Ewell | Thornton, Colorado, USA | RFC 5645, 4645, UTN #14 www.ewellic.org | www.facebook.com/doug.ewell | @DougEwell
