attaching characters that I lost after update today. See attached image from ff 65 and slack. It showed correctly in the past. Not sure how to debug what broke :/
Any ideas?
On Wed, 13 Mar 2019 19:39:32 +0200 Aleksandar Kostadinov akostadi@redhat.com wrote:
attaching characters that I lost after update today. See attached image from ff 65 and slack. It showed correctly in the past. Not sure how to debug what broke :/
Any ideas?
No, I see this also in firefox, but not everywhere, only on some web pages. I just assumed it was because I was using noscript and blocking access to images that were on a server I had blocked. It has been happening a lot longer for me than the last update. Since I use nightly, the development version of firefox, I would suspect that it is a code change that recently made into the production version.
Aleksandar Kostadinov akostadi@redhat.com:
attaching characters that I lost after update today. See attached image from ff 65 and slack. It showed correctly in the past. Not sure how to debug what broke :/
stan:
No, I see this also in firefox, but not everywhere, only on some web pages. I just assumed it was because I was using noscript and blocking access to images that were on a server I had blocked. It has been happening a lot longer for me than the last update. Since I use nightly, the development version of firefox, I would suspect that it is a code change that recently made into the production version.
Well, to even start to debug it, you'd have to mention some particular webpage addresses that are failing.
Commonly, things like that are down to missing characters in fonts. They were present in the font the webauthor used, but not yours. And for things that did work, but now don't, it could be that the font has changed (installs on your side, or, the author picked a different one).
Related to that can be the author using bizarre characters. They've picked some unusual thing that looks like what they want, but it only appears in some fonts. If they'd picked the normal symbol for such a thing, it'd be more widely supported.
Character encoding schemes can come into it, too. If they've used UTF8, but erroneously said their page was using 8859-1 (which can be done as a meta statement in the HTML, or the webserver's HTTP headers), it's going to fail. Or, if you've forced your browser to use a particular scheme, instead of obeying the website's instructions.
And, as you said, it can be down to missing graphics. The website may have used a graphic symbol with a text fallback. The graphic may have disappeared from their files, they may have got the address for it wrong on some pages, and their text fallback could be broken, too.
On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 15:31:41 +1030 Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
Well, to even start to debug it, you'd have to mention some particular webpage addresses that are failing.
I was going to put some examples in, but when I went looking for web pages that had the problem, I couldn't find any. :-)
Commonly, things like that are down to missing characters in fonts. They were present in the font the webauthor used, but not yours. And for things that did work, but now don't, it could be that the font has changed (installs on your side, or, the author picked a different one).
Related to that can be the author using bizarre characters. They've picked some unusual thing that looks like what they want, but it only appears in some fonts. If they'd picked the normal symbol for such a thing, it'd be more widely supported.
Character encoding schemes can come into it, too. If they've used UTF8, but erroneously said their page was using 8859-1 (which can be done as a meta statement in the HTML, or the webserver's HTTP headers), it's going to fail. Or, if you've forced your browser to use a particular scheme, instead of obeying the website's instructions.
All of the above make sense. I used to do this, checking the preference that said to use my font and size on all pages, but I checked my preferences and that appears to have disappeared. I do block google fonts so they can't track me that way, and many web pages use all the free tracking tools of google on their pages because it is so convenient. Perhaps that is why.
And, as you said, it can be down to missing graphics. The website may have used a graphic symbol with a text fallback. The graphic may have disappeared from their files, they may have got the address for it wrong on some pages, and their text fallback could be broken, too.
I'll keep an eye out, and if I run into a web page that shows the problem, I'll post it here so experts like you can possibly track down what is happening.
On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 08:55:24 -0700 stan via users wrote:
I'll keep an eye out, and if I run into a web page that shows the problem, I'll post it here so experts like you can possibly track down what is happening.
From time to time I've seen web pages where the headers claimed UTF-8 encoding, but the actual text on the page was some windows encoding (determined experimentally by display the text in various codings till one of them made sense). I'm pretty sure there must be some windows html editor that just has the UTF-8 headers as boilerplate, but doesn't bother to convert the text to UTF-8 when saving the page.
On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 12:18:09 -0400 Tom Horsley horsley1953@gmail.com wrote:
From time to time I've seen web pages where the headers claimed UTF-8 encoding, but the actual text on the page was some windows encoding (determined experimentally by display the text in various codings till one of them made sense). I'm pretty sure there must be some windows html editor that just has the UTF-8 headers as boilerplate, but doesn't bother to convert the text to UTF-8 when saving the page.
This makes sense. A windows developer would probably not think of other platforms, and thus never encounter the error. So it would persist.
Allegedly, on or about 16 March 2019, Tom Horsley sent:
From time to time I've seen web pages where the headers claimed UTF-8 encoding, but the actual text on the page was some windows encoding (determined experimentally by display the text in various codings till one of them made sense). I'm pretty sure there must be some windows html editor that just has the UTF-8 headers as boilerplate, but doesn't bother to convert the text to UTF-8 when saving the page.
I've seen that many times, too. I'd hazard a guess that's down to things like webauthors copying and pasting content, across different systems, using dumb software that doesn't transcode (or even know that it has to). And the importing of external data.
If it's automated, it's not going to be noticed by human eyes. And people are poor at proofreading, these days.
I should have added graphics stuck in your cache, too. If your cache isn't supplying previously downloaded graphics because of a browser bug, or webserver crapology, that can resolve itself once the cache refreshes (auto expired data, culling of cache space, etc).
On 03/16/19 11:55, stan via users wrote:
I do block google fonts so they can't track me that way, and many web pages use all the free tracking tools of google on their pages because it is so convenient.
. How do you do that? Google produced a suggestion to add "127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com" to the "hosts." I assume /etc/hosts but am not sure what the line should look like ...
On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 12:37:52 -0400 Bob Goodwin bobgoodwin@fastmail.us wrote:
On 03/16/19 11:55, stan via users wrote:
I do block google fonts so they can't track me that way, and many web pages use all the free tracking tools of google on their pages because it is so convenient.
. How do you do that? Google produced a suggestion to add "127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com" to the "hosts." I assume /etc/hosts but am not sure what the line should look like ...
I suppose that is a simpler solution. When the browser tries to find the font, it goes to the local machine. I am using noscript, and block that site.
I think it would just be 127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com But, there is already a line for 127.0.0.1 for localhost in /etc/hosts so you would probably have to append the fonts.googleapis.com to the end of that line.
On 3/16/19 9:37 AM, Bob Goodwin wrote:
On 03/16/19 11:55, stan via users wrote:
I do block google fonts so they can't track me that way, and many web pages use all the free tracking tools of google on their pages because it is so convenient.
. How do you do that? Google produced a suggestion to add "127.0.0.1 fonts.googleapis.com" to the "hosts." I assume /etc/hosts but am not sure what the line should look like ...
Just exactly that line and that's the right file. However, I would suggest using a different number to avoid conflicts with the real localhost entry. Anything starting with 127 works, but you can use "127.0.0.2 fonts.googleapis.com" for example. I have a huge list of entries like this in my hosts file.
On 03/16/19 13:23, Samuel Sieb wrote:
Just exactly that line and that's the right file. However, I would suggest using a different number to avoid conflicts with the real localhost entry. Anything starting with 127 works, but you can use "127.0.0.2 fonts.googleapis.com" for example. I have a huge list of entries like this in my hosts file. __________________________
I'll try that, thanks to all.
This probably should have been a new thread, sorry for that.
On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 15:31:41 +1030 Tim via users users@lists.fedoraproject.org wrote:
All of the above make sense. I used to do this, checking the preference that said to use my font and size on all pages, but I checked my preferences and that appears to have disappeared. I do block google fonts so they can't track me that way, and many web pages use all the free tracking tools of google on their pages because it is so convenient. Perhaps that is why.
Sometimes if you force to use only your specified fonts e.g. in Firefox web pages will show garbled characters. If you allow the website's fonts it could be you are able to see the real characters.
Just an idea, it happened on one site I use regularly and I did not know why until I went into Firefox's fonts settings.
On Sun, 17 Mar 2019 14:46:49 +0100 David Dusanic ivanovnegro@gmail.com wrote:
Sometimes if you force to use only your specified fonts e.g. in Firefox web pages will show garbled characters. If you allow the website's fonts it could be you are able to see the real characters.
Just an idea, it happened on one site I use regularly and I did not know why until I went into Firefox's fonts settings.
I was mistaken earlier. I had it set to use my fonts rather than page fonts (the selection was under advanced). I'll keep your suggestion in mind, and if I encounter this again, I'll turn that off and see if it fixes the problem.