TECH: Unicode, HTML and Edh

Howdy,

While updating my website, I noticed a problem.   First, for my website, I
specify UTF-8 as the character set, and use hexidecimal codes for all special
characters (including things like e with an acute accent).   Doing this allows
me to put up IPA symbols, as well as various other symbols with diacritics, and
on my browser, it comes through perfectly (I use Safari, for the Mac).   Any
problems I've ever had with Safari have been solved by downloading and
installing the proper unicode font.

For some reason or another (I can't remember why), I decided to open up
Internet Explorer to look at my website.   (Oh, I remember why.   Another TECH
question: Would there be a reason why you wouldn't be able to see mouse-over
messages in one browser whereas you can in another?   I'm currently having this
problem.   If you go to http://dedalvs.free.fr/zhyler/main.html, the main links
[e.g., Phonology, Noun Classes, etc.] will have special messages that appear
when you mouseover them, but these messages only appear in Internet Explorer.
If you do this on Safari, for example, all you see is the link.)   Anyway, I
immediately noticed that all the characters that looked so beautiful on Safari
came out as bubkus on Internet Explorer.   The specific problems are:

-All IPA characters *not* found in a normal font (e.g., Times New Roman,
Palatino...), save one (angma) come out as question marks [and angma comes out in
a different font].   This happened in Safari for me *until* I installed the
appropriate font.
-Theta comes out, but looks odd.
-Edh comes out, but it's that teeny-tiny edh that comes through whenever
anybody uses edh in an e-mail on CONLANG (I check my mail on AOL).   Same with
thorn.
-Capitalized edh (which is a D with a line through the bar) comes out strange
in the same way that theta comes out strange (same size, but different font,
it looks like).
-All the normal characters with diacritics (such as u-umlaut, and even
y-umlaut) come out fine.
-A really odd thing: On all my Njaama pages, I wrote "Igxu Hejm", but where
"gx" was a "g" with a circumflex accent on top.   This isn't a character with a
diacritic, but rather a single character, yet somehow it comes out as two.

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone else had encountered problems like these,
and if so, how you solved them.   A lot of people use Internet Explorer, and if
they're seeing the same thing *I'm* seeing when I use Internet Explorer,
they'll probably think I just made a really crappy website.

Thanks for any help you can offer.

-David

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