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Friday Fun Thread for January 9, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I guess modern web developers don't like Unicode, and prefer to retvrn to Wingdings.

At blame are browsers and their handling of images, that's why "UI" fonts are again on the rise.

(1) What problems do browsers have with displaying images? It's my understanding that browser display of images has only been improving, with "lazy loading" specified in HTML and implemented in browsers.

(2) What do images have to do with my comment? I'm talking about emoji, not images.

Can't style emojis, there are already lots of pretty good libraries of UIish fonts. Also browsers had (dunno if they still have) max concurrent download connections limits, also V-aligning images and text used to be a right old pain. Which is why those fonts became so popular.

Edit: Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.

I don't buy that. Browsers are more feature complete than ever, yet websites keep having worse and worse usability.

phones

Sure, they manage to somehow have even worse usability on phones ("Hey, let's prevent zooming just so people older than 25 can't read any of the tiny text or images!").