TECH: IPA/Unicode on different browsers (Was: New Conlang: Terkunan)

Hi!

T. A. McLeay writes:
> Henrik Theiling wrote:
> > Jeffrey Jones writes:
> >> ...
> >> I downloaded and installed Thryomanes 1.1, but it doesn't help if the web page
> >> selects a different font.
> >
> > Hmm.  It could be that your browser has an option like 'Always use my
> > fonts'.  I use that too to view everything with DejaVu.
> >
> > It could also be that the browser is too old to display Unicode
> > correctly.  In this case, it will not show you IPA no matter what font
> > you install.
>
> Internet Explorer will not show a character if the current font doesn’t
> have one, even if the user has a font installed which does contain that
> character. Presumably so it is bugwards compatible with old versions of
> Windows that didn’t use Unicode.
*sigh*

> IIRC Wikipedia gets around this by using a CSS class that specifies all
> known fonts that contain IPA characters in a special comment that every
> browser apart from IE recognises as a comment, but that IE doesn’t. Not
> abusing CSS *too* much...
Ah, an interesting ugly hack.  I will search for the corresponding
style sheet.  Thanks for the hint!

I found another thing that would be nice for my pages: to switch the
Latin I use, since I use macrons (even on 'V') for long vowels, which
requires Unicode, too.  It would be nice to switch this to
circumflexes on older browsers (i.e. V MACRO > U CIRCUMFLEX).

So far I failed to display only ISO-8859-1 on browsers that support no
Unicode, and display Unicode on those that do.  Any CSS solution is
welcome.  I do not want to use JavaScript for such a hack unless *my*
browser displays Unicode (i.e., displaying Unicode requires no
JavaScript, since I disabled it).  Heuristical solutions would be ok,
though, as long as most Unicode-enabled people see IPA and most others
don't.  Basically, I have two problems:

   1) I don't know how to find out whether my IPA and Latin will display
      correctly,

   2) I don't know how to switch from Unicode to ISO-only when the page
      is loaded.

Something I tried:

   <span class="cxs">:CXS:</span><span class="ipa" title=":IPA:"></span>

This displays :CXS: in browsers without style sheets.  Then I used
a style sheet:

.cxs        { display: none; }
.ipa:after  { content: attr(title); }

This makes :IPA: replace the :CXS: in CSS-enabled browsers.

Works fine for my Galeon (Mozilla engine), Dillo, and probably
Netscape 4.7x (disabled Javascript).

Unfortunately, this hides the text completely for browsers that
support CSS Version 1, but not CSS Version 2, which I read are most IE
browsers.  So this is not good.  I could also implement a solution
that displays CXS only on non-IE browsers by using some CSS hacks, but
that would be too restrictive, too.

**Henrik