Context solves this ambiguity in texts recording a human language, but in computer or smartphone applications it is extremely frequent to not have a context that allows disambiguation.

Ambiguous characters may have been acceptable in typefaces designed before 1990, but they are certainly not acceptable for any more recent design, unless the typeface is designed for a very specific and limited purpose, e.g. for a single advertising poster, and they will never be used for rendering arbitrary texts.

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Hupriene 4 days ago | parent [-]

To be fair the designer who created the font would probably agree that for use cases like passwords or serial numbers etc. you should use a different font. That's the nice thing about having different fonts around. You can choose which one you want to use.

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adrian_b 4 days ago | parent [-]

That is a solution applicable for a document or GUI created by yourself, where you can define various styles with associated fonts and use them appropriately.

However, I see the worst offenders on various Web pages (frequently for various URLs) where I do not control the typeface, unless I instruct the browser to ignore the style sheet of the rendered Web page and use my own fonts instead, which can be tedious or create other problems in the rendered page.

	▲	mjmas 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have a few CSS overrides for some websites to turn all input boxes into monospace fonts. It is far easier to use them then.