Ancient Web: Alan Wood Explained Why Webdings Could Break the Web

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

If a website depended on a proprietary symbol font, it could look like a page full of tiny pictures on one computer and a string of gibberish on the next.

Visit Alan Wood's Webdings reference.

Wood's page inventories the 223 characters of Microsoft's Webdings font and places their names, hexadecimal values, and Unicode alternatives in a long table. The entries include such wonderfully dated interface objects as a floppy disk, a home button, printer symbols, browser navigation icons, and a miniature 'under construction' sign.

It looks like a character chart, but the warning at the top is the point. Using HTML's old font face="Webdings" trick was never reliable as a standard Web feature. A visitor without the font might see the underlying Latin letters rather than the icons the author intended.

The page demonstrates both methods side by side: the browser-specific character and the corresponding Unicode numeric reference. Spider, spider web, paperclip, and trophy are among the first examples.

Web standards are a preservation issue

The Webdings table itself was created in December 2016, a date Wood gives at its foot. It belongs to his much older Unicode resources collection, which includes advice and tests built around older browsers, fonts, and multilingual document problems. The archive discusses the days when the standard 256-character fonts of many systems were an obstacle to displaying Russian, Greek, or accented letters correctly.

Wood's site map preserves browser-specific reference pages for Internet Explorer 3 through 6, Netscape 3 through 7, Mac OS 9, and early Unix environments. These are no longer a guide to current best practice; they are documentation of what it took to make text display correctly in the Web's earlier decades.

The site itself says its Unicode reference material was no longer being comprehensively updated. That is a useful boundary: this table is a historical and practical reference, not a promise to cover every modern Unicode addition.

A broken glyph seems like a small problem until an icon, mathematical sign, or character in someone's name vanishes. Wood's painstaking tables record the era when those failures required patient manual investigation.

Compare the Webdings mappings and explore the larger Unicode archive.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.