This is one of those things that kinda bugged me for a while but was so low on my listof things to care about I just never bothered to look deeper into it. I’m talking about the mysterious, seemingly random appearance of the letter J in some emails and and web pages. For those of you that may not know what in the world I’m talking about, this image should explain it:

Now I don’t think of myself as narcissistic, but I thought wow how nice, they’ve gone and personalized this page for me by putting my initial on the page. In a weird spot. Repeatedly. Without any way of knowing that my first name is Jason. Ok  so being that this example is from my daughter’s (horribly ugly and poorly coded) school system web site, I knew that what I saw could only be the result of some ugly error. But the problem was, I’ve seen this mysterious J popup in various emails and other web pages, so I decided to track down where it was coming from.

After a bit of searching I found a three year old post on the Microsoft blog that turned the lightbulb on over my head. Turns out that the J’s that I was seeing in Firefox and Safari (IE and Chrome didn’t do it) were supposed to be a smiley face in the Wingdings fonts. Low and behold I went back to my daughter’s school site, checked out the source code, and there it was, an inline CSS rule (blech) specifying the Windings font and the letter J (e.g. font-family:Wingdings). Now like 99.999%  of people using Windows, I have the Windings font installed, yet Firefox didn’t want to display it. Go figure.

So the lesson learned from this is a) the next time you see an errant J on the web or in an email, try mentally substituting a smiley face, b) don’t use the Wingdings font in your style sheets because some browsers will ignore it and c) if you need to insert a text smiley face in an email or web page, use the old standby of :) or :-) instead (or maybe even unicode 263a). Now I can sleep at night.