An icon font ligature is just an entry in the font file that says to display a particular sequence of characters as a single glyph. In the absence of the font the browser doesn't know that the page designer (or the font designer) intended a ligature. If you force an alternative font the browser will just display the sequence of characters that made up the ligature.
A few ligatures do have their own unicode code points, e.g. ffi, so the browser knows what is intended independent of the font. The ligatures used by icon fonts do not have their own code points.
> An icon font ligature is just an entry in the font file that says to display a particular sequence of characters as a single glyph.
Most icon fonts use private-use codepoints, not ligatures. These codepoints have no standard glyph, so disabling site-specific fonts will make those characters fail to render at all or display placeholder characters (e.g. �).
Thankfully, icon fonts are declining rapidly in usage - SVG icons are superior for most use cases.
> A few ligatures do have their own unicode code points, e.g. ffi, so the browser knows what is intended.
The precomposed ligature codepoints (e.g. U+FB00-FB06) only exist for compatibility with legacy encodings which included similar characters. They shouldn't be used in new documents. If you want text on a web page to use ligatures, use the CSS font-variant-ligatures property to control which ones are used. (And make sure to disable them on monospaced text!)
Its interesting that Firefox would offer a feature that disables all custom fonts rather than simply prioritizing the user's preferred font.
It does add a bit of performance gain not loading the fonts, and it may be a small security improvement, but if the goal was usability/readability that seems like a huge miss.
A preference based system would be almost impossible to maintain considering the literal infinite number of type faces out there (thousands plus more built every week).
Add to that, this feature also needs to be understandable for non-technical people who might never have view a page source in their lives.
Much as a granular system would be more powerful and preferable for the HN community, having a dumb toggle makes a lot more sense from Firefox’s perspective.
I wasn't thinking granular control. It could work exactly like the existing preference with users picking a preferred font. That font is always set as the highest priority font and used for any characters it supports, but the page's custom fonts are still fallbacks and kept in the font stack for any characters missing from the user font.
This would be helpful for icon fonts, but also for user preferred fonts that don't cover all language character sets.
No problem at all! I haven't been by my desktop the last couple days but I do want to test it. I hope that's already how it works, that would make more sense to me than blocking all custom font loading (though that does have its purposes).
I have one project using them, mainly because SVGs can be a bit of a pain to use in XSLT.
edit: it may not be SVGs themselves. The icons on that site are repeated and I would reach for an SVG sprite that can be reused, I ran into issues with that working cross browser in XSLT - Firefox was actually the problem if I'm not mistaken.
I tried to submit a story with a lengthy title a couple of days ago and HN refused to accept it until I'd cut it down. So it's probably the submitter's doing.
If you start with an unambiguous grammar then you aren't going to introduce ambiguities by implementing it with a recursive descent parser.
If you are developing a new grammar it is quite easy to accidentally create ambiguities and a recursive descent parser won't highlight them. This becomes painful when you try to evolve the grammar.
They delay platform announcements because they believe that a platform crammed full of waiting passengers will become a crush risk when the arriving passengers start to disembark.
When they announce the platform there is often enough time to stroll, but people rush because they want a seat.
> there is often enough time to stroll, but people rush because they want a seat.
I'm someone who used to frequently catch the last train north to Birmingham on a Saturday night (9:40pm), and it was usually full and so some people were without a seat. Of course we all rushed to try to get a seat. IMHO, it's foolishness to think people would do otherwise in that situation - after all who wants to stand for over an hour and a half when you've paid over £30 for the ticket?
> partly due to inability for the U.K. to run large projects
And what do you have to say about the Elizabeth Line? At one point, it was Europe's largest infrastructure project. I would say it has been a huge success.
Just think, an extra 11 pounds per seat to reserve your own!
I hate those stupid fees but it would increase revenue and at the end of the day…
< I’d pay it :( >
Yeah, I dunno. It seems like a shame to charge people extra for sitting, but it also would be nice for a less-fit person to be able to encode the idea somehow “I’ll wait for next train if it means I can sit,” while still giving people the option to hop on when it is standing room only.
But like, now I assume if somebody is not very fit, they don’t really have the option, right? There will be a race either way and of course the people who most need a seat are least likely to win. (I will keep standing on trains in the hope it’ll keep me from ever needing to sit, haha).
Anyone in the know knows where to look to find out the platform before it's "sanctioned for the public to be informed about it".
And no, there isn't always time to stroll to the train, I've seen some really, really late announcements. Couple this with very large countdown timers that they actually added recently to each platform and you can see exactly why people feel stressed and rush.
> They delay platform announcements because they believe that a platform crammed full of waiting passengers will become a crush risk when the arriving passengers start to disembark.
The alternative is forcing them all to wait in the same cramped concourse area (with most space lost to retail units). During disruption, it gets genuinely difficult to move through this area. It has felt unpleasant in normal use for a while, but when there are cancellations and delays it feels positively dangerous. I am not exaggerating when I say that it feels very much like it's only a matter of time before something happens and someone gets crushed or trampled.
There's none of this nonsense at some other London termini, and Birmingham New Street manages to let people wait on the platforms. Why can't Euston?
> Anyone in the know knows where to look to find out the platform...
And for anyone who isn't in the know, that's Realtime Trains[1]. It isn't correct 100% of the time; it uses the public record of train movements (TRUST) to predict which platform a train will arrive at, but is prevented by National Rail Enquiries from using the live status and delay data which official departure boards show (Darwin). That means that if the platform is changed at the last minute it is not certain that Realtime Trains will be able to detect the change.
Those will show a copy of the train describer data, which is the same thing that the actual signallers use to keep track of which train runs to which timetable, so they (or the computer, where available) can route it accordingly.
When there’s a little delay you often find that a trian leaving at say :30 will be advertised at :26 with big warnings about platforms closing 2 minutes early, so everyone panics and 400 people try to get to platform 4 in 120 seconds, which is of course impossible.
Curiously, I've had the exact same problem when I was in Britain. At Heathrow Airport. They would not announce which gate flights leave from until ~20 minutes before boarding.
Considering there's no 'crush risk' in this scenario, what even is the point of it? In the end I just used any of the myriad of online sites that list flight data to know which gate I needed to head to 1.5 hours before everyone else, and got to enjoy some peace and quiet.
> We want to recognize that the Mono Project was the first .NET implementation on Android, iOS, Linux, and other operating systems.
Is this true? The pre-releases and version 1 of .Net came with the source for a reference implementation of the CLR that ran on Linux or BSD. I can't remember what license it had and I thought Mono was a separate project, but maybe Mono was based on it. Not that it matters now.
You are thinking of Rotor. FWIW, I also feel as if Portable.NET--which was rebranded at some point to DotGNU when I think it was even donated to the FSF--had predated Mono in functioning?
The Mono website has an archive of an old mailing list post which at the time talks about even-older origin of the project. It is (of course) heavily biased for Mono, and hilariously gives me an awkward shout out ;P.
So it ran on Windows, FreeBSD and Mac OS X making it the first non-Windows implementation of .Net, but it didn't run on Linux. It also had a fairly useless licence, so Mono was separate.
We have known for centuries that we are all born with propensities towards this and that, but that we are also able to make choices.
The fact that we can now discover the genes behind a particular propensity does not make the actions you take any or more or less of a personal responsibility than they were a century ago.
There are good arguments on either side of the debate but discovering the underlying physical mechanism doesn't make any difference.
Even if we discover, say, a violence gene, we can't usefully test for it because it may be present and inactive or there may be other violence genes as yet undiscovered. It doesn't tell you anything at the individual level.
Genetic fatalism is currently fashionable but it is not a fact.
You are just repeating that X is false. Everybody knows it's false, except some racist people irrationally trying to justify their biases.
That doesn't change the fact that if it was true, the morality around it would have complete different dimensions, and none of what is talked about it would make any sense.
If prices keep going up then landlords will be happy because they got the same result without paying RealPage, and the renters are no worse off than they are under the current system. That's a win.
If the law achieves its goal and prices stop rising that is also a win.
While I agree that the giant metal spikes we put on all the cars aren't the exclusive reason that cars are lethal, I would hope we both agree that cars are less lethal when we don't cover them in giant metal spikes.
The legislature doesn’t need to wait for the courts to prove collusion beyond a reasonable doubt before they act. RealPage is illegal collusion. It is very clear from the FTC and DOJ. Making it specifically illegal means that the DA doesn’t need to prove it is collusion every time they bring a case.
A few ligatures do have their own unicode code points, e.g. ffi, so the browser knows what is intended independent of the font. The ligatures used by icon fonts do not have their own code points.
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