who's a pretty luddite, then?

I have just been forced to decline a poem for Otoliths, not because I didn't like it—I do—but because it made liberal use of wingdings, & I've discovered that coding for wingdings produces nonsense characters on machines using any other browser than IE. &, as the graph below demonstrates, that's the majority of visitors to the site.



I did a search for the reason for the gibberish, & found:

For Windows, browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape 4 that are not standards-compliant allow non-Unicode fonts such as Wingdings to be specified in HTML or CSS, to enable additional special characters to be displayed. Specifying Wingdings font is contrary to the published specifications, has never been a documented feature of HTML, is not reliable, and should not be done.

My normal default is to view in IE when I post stuff; but I've found over time that the robustness of HTML in IE is not always echoed in other browsers. Usually it's small stuff—forgetting the semi-colon at the end when you're coding for spaces still shows as a space in IE but displays the actual code in Firefox. Occasionally it's a bit more complex, when, for example, there's a passage with a number of tags to it—say italics + bold + underlined + font face + font size—which can be closed in any order in IE & produce the desired result, but which have to be closed in a mirror sequence to their opening to get what you want in Firefox. These errors are generally picked up when I put up the page for the contributor to check, but I've had Firefox loaded for a couple of years to be able to check things if I need to.

But I don't like Firefox. Not for any aesthetic reason, just the fact that proponents of the browser display an almost religious zeal in their advocacy. They remind me of adherents to the theory of creationism, proselytizing that Firefox is a true example of Intelligent Design. Which fits with.....

"Most Americans do not accept the theory of evolution. Instead, 51 percent of Americans say God created humans in their present form, and another three in 10 say that while humans evolved, God guided the process. Just 15 percent say humans evolved, and that God was not involved." (CBS poll, 2005)

Looks like I'm out on my own here.