Web browser mechanisms and special character

Question

I am very surprised by this. Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Firefox have their own version of HTML characters. I just don’t understand that character rendering is determined by the browser. So, somewhere in my browser application code there are specifications for native rendering of HTML Entity for a snowman:

Or compare the almost radical size differences between the recycle icon and the double square sign between Chrome or Safari and Firefox: http://marckremers.com/SO/test.html In Opera, it doesn't even display a double square.

I am completely confused and really disappointed with the short browser site. Here they had a great opportunity to offer web developers and designers a standardized character set for any user interface. But no, they all make their own bizarre versions, which means that we cannot rely on them for consistent web design.

My question is: is there a way to show these characters in sequence? Have an official snowman? (as an example, it can be any of hundreds of characters)

Finally, please go here to explore the apparent difference in rendering (browse browsers to see)

http://copypastecharacter.com/

EDIT Having looked further, it is obviously connected with rendering mechanisms of Webkit, Gecko and Presto (Opera), but not with different browsers. Safari and Chrome display exactly the same snowman.

Answer 1

The answer is ... decimal representation of snowman 9731 , as stated at http://copypastecharacter.com/ :

 <span data-decimal="9731" data-entity="&amp;#9731;" data-id="45739" title="Snowman">☃</span> 

This is a hexadecimal representation of 0x2603 . Looking at this character at unicode.org/charts , we should study this document .

The Fonts section indicates:

The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code diagrams are not prescriptive . In real fonts. The specific fonts used in these diagrams were provided by the Unicode Consortium by several font developers who own the rights to the fonts.

Conclusion

Glyphs are simply not standardized; you cannot rely on its graphical representation. This may depend on the font, as well as the application that you use to display characters (the application or browser may use an internal font other than the OS). Btw: on my box (Ubuntu 11.04) the characters look exactly the same in Firefox (7.0.1) and Chrome (15).

We liked the standard with two different snowmen - with and without snowflakes in the background :-)