On Mon, 27 Nov 2000, Magda Danish (Unicode) wrote:
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kai Andresen [mailto:kai@kai-andresen.de]
- -
> How is it possible to embed characters of the IPA Extensions, as shown
> at
> http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0250.pdf
> into HTML?
> Is a 'meta'-tag necessary?
Yes, it is possible, but browser support varies. In principle you
can include any Unicode character into an HTML document, in various
ways - including the possibility of just using a Unicode encoding
(UTF-8 is recommended then, by IETF policy) and the possibility of
using numeric character references like ɐ (for U+0250 - in theory,
hexadecimals could be used too, but decimals still work much better
in those numeric references in HTML).
There are several problems with browser support (not to mention
what problems there are with indexing robots and other software
that might process HTML documents!). And the META tags (for specifying
document encoding) are a controversial issue here. There are various
pros and cons, and it's a long story... I've tried to explain some
essentials at
http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/HTML/chars.var
For IPA Extensions characters in particular, there's the practical problem
that several fonts that otherwise cover a relatively large set of Unicode
characters haven't got glyphs for them. The situation is improving
however; specifically, Arial Unicode MS (see
http://officeupdate.microsoft.com/2000/downloadDetails/aruniupd.htm )
seems to cover most of IPA Extensions. Having tested with
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/%7eflavell/unicode/unidata02.html
and my browser set to use Arial Unicode MS, I'd say it covers the block
except for the last five characters (U+02A9 through U+20AD).
This doesn't however mean that one could write full IPA very successfully.
IPA writing needs combining diacritic marks too. I was positively
surprised at seeing that IE 4 can handle some combinations, like
ɐ́, but the implementation is rather simplistic and doesn't
work that well for all diacritics, or for cases where several diacritics
are to be combined with a base character.
-- Yucca, http://www.hut.fi/u/jkorpela/
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