[chromium-discuss] The font used in Omnibox UI is unideal as capital i (I) and lowercase l (l) look near identical

[Nickolas Flannigan]

The similarity between I and l is a holdout from the olden days, when every
byte saved was important and context was considered sufficient to tell
whether an I or l is meant. It's been over 30 years, and I believe trying
to save a minuscule bit of memory and storage is no longer that important.
In terms of the URL, the homoglyphs I and l are also one situation where
context is *not* sufficient to tell which letter is meant, as randomly
generated URLs use both and nothing in them will hint as to whether I or l
is used, eg.

which is inconvenient for those who might
want to copy down these URLs by hand.

[Jason Frazzano]

The similarity between I and l is a holdout from the olden days, when every byte saved was important and context was considered sufficient to tell whether an I or l is meant. It's been over 30 years, and I believe trying to save a minuscule bit of memory and storage is no longer that important. In terms of the URL, the homoglyphs I and l are also one situation where context is not sufficient to tell which letter is meant, as randomly generated URLs use both and nothing in them will hint as to whether I or l is used, eg. http://youtu.be/duYF_3ncl0 which is inconvenient for those who might want to copy down these URLs by hand.
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