Viewing Unicode-encoded web pages with IPA characters

A computer that has been configured with a Unicode IPA font and a Unicode web browser can be used to view Unicode-encoded web pages that include IPA characters.

Unicode and UTF-8

A web page may specify a particular character set. By default, when you create a web page, the character set is probably "iso-8859-1", which is a Latin encoding standard for Latin characters, with no positions dedicated to IPA characters (except for the IPA characters that are also Latin characters). Unicode-encoded web pages use an encoding standard called UTF-8 to translate Unicode character codes into data that can be sent over the Internet. This translation is required because Unicode uses 16 bits to identify one character, while the Internet expects data to fit into 8-bit (one byte) chunks.

Some of the gory details: Among the incompatibities is the function of the null byte. In Unicode, the first 255 characters all have a zero in each of the first 8 bits of the character. These 8 zeros are indistinguishable from a null btye consisting of 8 zeros. Many computing processes (the Internet, C compilers) give a special significance to the null byte, and would incorrectly interpret pure Unicode characters as special directives. UTF-8 translates Unicode character codes into byte-sized chunks without null bytes, and additionally only requiring one byte for each ASCII (Latin) character. For the rest of the gory details, see Roman Czyborra's UTF page.

Viewing Unicode IPA web pages on Mac OS X

Although Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator claim Unicode support, these web browsers use translation tables to translate Unicode (UTF-8) character codes into non-Unicode character codes that the browsers know how to correctly display. Sadly, no translation tables exist in these browsers for Unicode IPA characters. Therefore, in a UTF-8 encoded page including many different non-Latin Unicode characters, all of the characters will display correctly except for the IPA characters.

The solution to this problem is to use OmniWeb, which uses Unicode fonts installed on the computer to directly (and correctly) display all available Unicode characters. Thus once OmniWeb has been installed, Unicode-encoded web pages that include IPA characters can be correctly viewed on Mac OS X, assuming that an appropriate font is installed.

Viewing Unicode IPA web pages on Windows 2000

Internet Explorer will automatically view web pages encoded with UTF-8, assuming that an appropriate font is installed.

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