Friday, January 12, 2007

Browser wars


Sometimes I'm hopeful that our brave new world will someday work seamlessly, whether we're talking software or international boundaries and governments.
Other times, I realize we have a long way to go.
I think this image tells a very short story of where we are now. It's like a college essay prompt I heard about last night: "Imagine you've written your autobiography. Tell me what's on Page 217."
This shot is Page 217 of our technical evolution.

4 comments:

Andria said...

Now I'm really confused.
That line of obscure characters apparently is coded to be webdings, according to Firefox browser on a PC.
So who's to say which machine is displaying it correctly? Perhaps Firefox on a Mac is displaying it correctly, as webdings and not in English.
The authors' messages change depending on the tool used to see that message. The medium is the message blah blah.
Must do real work now.

gercohenJoMC712 said...

hey, you stole that from my blog!
Yes, I did it in webdings, as that was one of bloggers pulldown fonts available to me in my test post!

Andria said...

What's so interesting is that I can't figure out how it's really supposed to display. Which browser has it right -- Firefox or Internet Explorer?
Let's say I was inspired by it on your blog -- "stealing" might be too harsh?

Andria said...

Gerry,
What do I see on my Mac with Firefox?
Instead of the word "This," I see:
First character: a boat.
Second character: an ambulance
Third character: an "i" in a circle.
Fourth character: a question mark.

Then a space

And instead of the next word being "line," it is:
Next character: four-pointed star.
Next character: an "i" in a circle.
Next character: a big round dot.
Next character: a present.

And so forth. Firefox on a PC shows it as "This line is in webdings."

I know little about fonts on Macs, but went to an application called Font Book on the Mac, and it displays webdings the same way, as symbols and not letters.