![]() How many people know what the circled plus symbol “⊕” stands for? Maybe 1 out of 1,000, optimistically thinking. The main issue, however, is that people do not generally recognize characters in the meanings that you would assign to them. The proper reading would generally depend on meaning and context. Just reading the Unicode name of a character can be cryptic or outright misleading. Well, they don’t, and they often fail to read properly even the most common special characters. Screen readers could make sense of special characters if they used a database of various properties of characters. Making them significantly larger would improve the situation, but this more or less proves that such text characters are not suitable for controls. ![]() There is no general reason against not using them, but loads of specific reasons why some specific characters might not be the best approach in a specific situation.įor example, the “little dots” you mention in your example (probably not dots at all but circles or bullets), when used as control elements as you describe, would mean poor usability and poor accessibility. The characters are used in HTML documents. (None of the characters mentioned are encoded in ASCII. And it’s about characters, seen as “weird” or “uncommon” or “special” from some perspective, not about character encodings. in HTML documents?” This seems to be what the question is about-not really about code. The question is very broad it could be split to literally thousands of questions of the type “why shouldn’t I use character. If you are telling use them, if you are showing use Image, or CSS. So ask the question: "What am I doing?" and then use what was designed for that task. Those characters are text, they are for telling someone something. CSS is for making things look good while you show them.Any possible issue one of those characters can bring will be multiplied by the fact that it is part of your UI.įrom an artistic stand point they simply limit your abilities too much. It works in the flow of your text, but as a vital part of the UI there can be major problems. Plus many devices do not support heavy font manipulation, and will often display them poorly. You could simply style some div elements to be round and filled/not filled for your example.Īs far as design goes they are really limiting, finding one that fits with the style of your page can be a hassle, and may mean that you will definitely need to embed a font, which is still only supported by the latest browsers. While it may be safe to use them in many cases, it is still better to use HTML elements where possible. I could have either replaced them with normal quotes " or with HTML entities to keep the style “ and ” ( “ and ”).Īny Unicode character can be inserted this way (even those without special names). They showed up fine in Notepad++, but when I viewed the page I did not get quotes, I got some weird symbol. I recently copied some text from Word directly into my code, Word used smart quotes (quote marks that curve inwards properly). Just inserting those characters into your code can lead to unpredictable results. It is important however to point out that you should never hard code those characters, instead use HTML entities. Not to mention that devices like that are very old, and uncommon.Īll in all it was probably not a good idea a handful of years ago, but now you are not likely to have problems as long as you cover all your bases. However depending on what your site does and the audience you are targeting this may not be a problem for you. If that font does not support your character you will run into problems. However sometimes certain devices will not have multiple fonts to choose from. You can also use an embedded font, though be sure to fall back on a web safe font that contains the character you need as many browser will not support embedded fonts. As long as you use a web safe font, and know that that character is available in that font, you should probably be okay. However since CSS can control font use you probably will not run into this problem. The problem is that some fonts simply do not have them.
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