I stumbled upon [open typography](http://opentypography.org/). Their main message is:
> «There is no reason to wait for browser development to catch up.
> We can all create better web typography ourselves, today.»
As somebody who tried to make my website using some nice typography features and in particular _ligatures_, I believe this is wrong.
I already made an automatic system which will detect and replace text by their ligatures in my blog. But this I never published this on the web and this is why.
[^1]: In fact, you might see a ligature and the search works because I now use some CSS ninja skills: `text-rendering: optimizelegibility`. But it also works because I use the right font; Computer Modern. Steal my CSS at will.
The browser isn't able to understand that the ligature character "<spanstyle="color:#800">fi</span>" should render as <sc>fi</sc> when rendered in small caps. And one part of the problem is you should choose to display a character in small caps using %css.
This way, how could you use a ligature Unicode character on a site on which you could change the %css?
If you take attention to detail, you'll see the first "first" contains a ligature. Of course the second render nicely. The code I used were:
<codeclass="latex">
\item first
\item {\sc first}
</code>
%latex was intelligent enough to create himself the ligatures when needed.
The "<spanstyle="color:#800">st</span>" ligature is rare and not rendered in %latex by default. But if you want you could also render rare ligature using %xelatex: