On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 15:31:41 +1030
Tim via users <users(a)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.