My thoughts on rendering phonetics on a web page are:
- If I have the capability of seeing IPA, I would like to do so
even if the author, lacking the ability to enter the characters,
used the ASCII transcription.
- If I do not have the capability of seeing IPA, when presented
with such, I would prefer to see the transcription rather than a
mass of "unknown character" glyphs.
- If my browser supports it, I would like to be able to select a
phonetic transcription and hear an automatically generated
rendering.
Clearly these are not things that can be required of a browser, but as
they are useful, it would be a shame to preclude a browser supporting
them.
It would seem that the cleanest way to insert this ability in HTML is
to regester two new languages "i-phon-ipa" and "i-phon-ascii" and then
write
My name is pronounced
<lang lang=i-phon-ascii>/'Evn- 'kRSn-,bAm/</lang>
Reading rfc1766, it seems to be intended to cover only human
languages, although it does make a distinction between script
variants, as "az-arabic" and "az-cyrillic". Is this a reasonable use
of this attribute? If not, is there a better way to do this in HTML?
----
Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------
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