Transcription (was Re: Is LANG appropriate for non-human languages?)

James K. Tauber (jtauber@cyllene.uwa.edu.au)
Thu, 3 Aug 95 02:13:38 EDT

Like Evan, I would like to see IPA transcriptions handled nicely on the
Web. But I agree with Martin to a certain extent that it should be a
browser issue. What would be nice is a browser that has a table of
transliterations of Unicode that would be used when the fonts are not
available or the display is purely text-based. This would handle the
*display* side of things in way that, as far as I can tell, would not be
the concern of HTML.

But what about *entry*. Perhaps what is needed is something akin to the
writing system declarations of TEI.

In my Ancient Greek work, I'd rather write

<lang lang=gr wsd=teigrk>*LO/GOJ ...</lang>

than

<lang lang=gr>&Lgr&oacugr&ggr&ogr&sfgr ...</lang>

or worse :-)

<IMG SRC="gif/lgr.gif" ALT="L"><IMG SRC="gif/oacugr.gif" ALT="O/">
<IMG SRC="gif/ggr.gif" ALT="G"><IMG SRC="gif/ogr.gif" ALT="O">
<IMG SRC="gif/sfgr.gif" ALT="J">

James K. Tauber <jtauber@cyllene.uwa.edu.au>
Programmer and CWIS Officer
University Computing Services
University of Western Australia