Creating Unicode IPA web pages

There are two basic ways to creating web pages. The first is by creating HTML code by hand; the second is by using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web page editor such as Dreamweaver, GoLive, or Word.

Mac OS X

TextEdit supports documents written in UTF-8, thus allowing hand-creation of HTML code with Unicode characters. Some TextEdit preferences must be changed in order to do this. Most important are setting "Plain Text Encoding, Save:" to "UTF-8", checking the "Rich text processing, Ignore rich text commands in HTML files", and setting the "New Document Font" to a Unicode font (Lucida Sans Unicode or Arial Unicode MS).

Once you have set your preferences, remember to include the following line as the first line of the <head> element of the HTML page:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

This line ensures that the document is interpreted by web browsers as being a Unicode document rather than using any other sort of encoding.

IMPORTANT NOTE! If you use Fetch to upload your UTF-8 documents to a web server, note that the documents must be transferred as "Raw data" rather than as "Text". "Text" refers only to ASCII text, not to Unicode text.

Currently, I do not know of any WYSIWYG web page editor for OS X that supports Unicode.

Windows 2000

The easiest way to create a Unicode IPA web page in Windows 2000 is by saving a Word document as a web page. To do this in Word 2000, Choose “Options” from the Tools menu, select the “General” tab, and then click the “Web Options” button. Then, select the “Encoding Tab”, choose “Unicode (UTF-8)”, and check “Always save Web pages in the default encoding”. Then click “OK”. Then choose “Save as Web Page” from the File menu, save your web page, and upload to your web site.

Note that the IPA characters in the Word document must all be in a Unicode font in order to correctly export as a Unicode web page. If a non-Unicode IPA font is used, the characters will be incorrectly exported as ASCII (Latin) characters due to their 0-255 character codes.

I am not familiar with any applications for hand-coding UTF-8 HTML documents that will allow input of IPA characters. It would be possible to create the IPA characters in Word, and then copy and paste these characters into NotePad, which is a UTF-8 capable text editor.

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