GoSeigen wrote:Having consulted Meta AI I'll partially answer the question. Meta AI suggested the likely cause is a font issue, e.g. a font that is dynamically loaded and then some characters are ready before others; it also suggested that "font sub-setting" might be involved and that it might be a GPU acceleration issue.
Looking at the particular Guardian issue, I viewed the HTML source and note that each letter is actually rendered individually in the source code (using a <path> element), so that would explain how some letters appear before others. I think that wouldn't apply in other cases I've experienced where whole swathes of text have missing letters.
Well then for the Guardian case at least it isn't a font issue, 'cos <path> is an SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) element, so while the letters look like text they're actually not text but drawn graphics. See
https://www.w3schools.com/graphics/svg_path.asp(By drawing the letters the Guardian can ensure that their logo looks exactly as they want, whereas if they used text then they don't have that control, as the browser may not have the font they'd prefer installed, or may decide to override it anyway.)