On 6 November 2010 09:52, Andrew Coppin
I can't remember the last time I saw a browser that couldn't do this. There /are/ symbols that don't work reliably, but the basic arrow symbols seem to be pretty well supported.
Okay I'll shift my position a bit... Arrows are likely present in a "modern" "system" font. Outside the Symbol font, they aren't a standard symbol in PostScript and the font standards are based on PostScript - OpenType being the latest though it has less PostScript than its predecessors. But fonts are still quite a different beast to Unicode. So fonts are completely free not to define arrows or most other symbols, however it seems that standard system fonts e.g Arial, Times New Roman on Windows define them. There's no guarantee they will be present in the standard system fonts on old systems or in non-system fonts that define whichever symbols the font designer feels necessary. Modern browsers might add in arrow from a different font if it is not present in the one chosen by the web page author - I suspect this is happening on this page where the arrow "looks wrong" typographically: http://conal.net/blog/posts/adding-numbers/