Comments on: Firefox 3

By: Kristi

Kristi — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 22:28:47 +0000

You’re correct that they can easily be replaced with actual graphics (and the best way is to decorate the “span” with CSS, rather than use an IMG tag). However, if you really want to use text as a graphic the only way that seems to work reliably is to stick to UNICODE dingbats. Granted, they don’t offer as many options as the Windows “webdings” or “dingbats” do, but Unicode did render the same way for me in IE7, FF3, and Safari when I tested it. In the code I replaced “)” with ✎ (lower-right pencil), and “^” with ✐✐ (2 upper-right pencils) since there are no “balloons” in the Unicode dingbats set. I then changed the style-sheet so “balloons” said “color: #333;font-size: 30px;” (better contrast color, no font-family, bigger dingbat display size).

By: Jim

Jim — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:38:51 +0000

Yeah, I was bummed when I first loaded the theme in IE and realized the ) and ^ were comment balloons that didn’t show up in Firefox. I wonder if that’s something that could be filed in Trac for FF3 for a later release version.

By: Tyler

Tyler — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:03:26 +0000

I see. It seems they render in Firefox 2/3 on Linux, or Firefox 2 on OS X. But not Firefox 3 for OS X or Windows. Pretty annoying as that font set has a lot of useful graphics for avoiding an image here or there. There is a way to get it to do it by changing/removing the doctype, but that is a bad idea. I’ve also seen tips on customizing your Firefox to display Webding fonts but that isn’t useful for the general public. May need to reconsider using them (not that I didn’t a lot), although the ) and ^ that are instead used are not completely horrible. Both can easily be replaced with actual graphics as well for someone skinning the theme.

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:27:23 +0000

It definitely rounds the corners very nicely. The Webdings comment balloons don’t really seem to be rendering any better for me, though.