Why am I seeing this kind of weird emoji-like characters in web page

Question

I'm getting these weird emoji-like characters when I see the official website of ballerinalang.com hosting by wso2.com

Can anybody please tell me why am I seeing this kind of stuff? It's really irritating. I can't see a single word but these weird characters.

Here's a Screenshot of the page:

Answer 1

Do you have JavaScript disabled in your browser or are you using software, such as NoScript, that may block JavaScript on a website? If you don't know whether JavaScript is being blocked, you can visit Determine if JavaScript is Enabled to make that determination.

The site expects to use the Cairo font that a browser will normally automatically download if JavaScript is enabled. I.e., the site has the following JavaScript code on the home page for the site:

<script type="text/javascript">
   WebFontConfig = {
     google: { families: [ 'Cairo:200,300,400,600,700,900:latin', 'Source+Sans+Pro:400,600,400italic,700italic,700:latin' ] }
   };
   (function() {
     var wf = document.createElement('script');
     wf.src = ('https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https' : 'http') +
       '://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1.5.18/webfont.js';
     wf.type = 'text/javascript';
     wf.async = 'true';
     var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
     s.parentNode.insertBefore(wf, s);
   })();
</script>

Google makes many fonts available for website developers to use on their websites. Since a visitor to the site may not have that font installed on his system, Google provides JavaScript code that can be included in webpages that will result in the browser automatically fetching the font from a Google font server. You could manually download the Cairo font and see if that resolves the problem or enable JavaScript (instructions for Firefox), if you are blocking it in your browser. It is possible that your browser is substituting some dingbat font, e.g. wingdings, for Cairo that results in the odd display of the page when you view it.