Re: TECH: Unicode, HTML and Edh

IE on Mac has consistently annoyed me to the point that I don't design for
it anymore, since it has so many deficiencies. Not that this is relevant to
you, but 98% of my websites' constituencies are PC or non-IE Mac, so I felt
free to just leave problems on Mac IE there.



  _____

From: Constructed Languages List [mailto:CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU] On
Behalf Of David Peterson
Sent: Tuesday, March 02, 2004 4:29 PM
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
Subject: [CONLANG] 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