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Comment by barrkel | Hacker News Reader

And of course, if you don't enable custom fonts in your browser, they still show up as boxes with hex digits (in Firefox, at least).

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That's about five or six people affected by that problem then...

hehe ;)

You might be surprised there. The fonts don't show up for those who use NoScript in default-deny mode (which is the suggested, and default, mode for this popular extension) either. Yes, this is solved by allowing the specific script (which?) to run for that page. I generally just leave the page as it is, showing funny characters instead of the intended icons.

Serious question: At this point, when you use noscript, don't you expect the web to be broken more places than not?

Serious answer: those sites which insist on being unusable for those who don't run scripts - be it those running text-based browsers of those who block scripts - are not worth visiting in my not that humble opinion.

I deem a site to be usable when the content can be read. Sometimes this means scrolling through an un-styled list of links and sundry before I can read whatever the site tries to convey. So be it.

What scripts? The topic at hand is usage of custom fonts. Should we use images instead to please you?

I'm one of six, apparently.

Make it six or seven.

All four of you are crushed, I'm sure. ;)

I'm one of four, apparently.

Do you mean if you disable custom fonts in your browser? I was under the impression that all modern browsers enabled them by default now.

Image based icons will similarly fail for people who don't enable images in their browser. In other news, this is a much faster way to load and display icons at appropriate resolutions for the 99.99% of the interest who can view fonts.

Doesn't Firefox come with custom fonts enabled by default though ? It has always been displayed correctly for me and I never had to switch anything on or off.

Could the same goal be achieved with custom fonts disabled ?

Perhaps. I think he was implying that he turned it off manually. I don't think it can shown with custom fonts disabled, as it is an icon set as a custom font.

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