I've done some testing now at home on my Mac, and neither Mac Phoenix
nor Mac Internet Explorer correctly display the Unicode IPA extensions.
Safari displays most of them, but is missing some critical symbols, like
the 'er' sound in 'her'.
It seems that a solution that works entirely correctly for the majority
of browser users is really the only acceptable solution. Since most
browser users use IE, just using Unicode IPA isn't really going to cut.
Since we cannot rely on browsers to correctly render IPA, we'll have to
render ourself, at the server-side. Since I've done my testing, I really
think option 1 from my first message is the best:
1.) Auto-detect the browser and send IPA Unicode to browsers that
support it and TIPA LaTeX images to those that don't. (Pros: attractive
display of IPA for all users. Cons: lots of programming)
This way, as certain browser/OS combinations come to be known to be
reliably reproducing IPA, we can let them get the Unicode IPA, and
everyone else gets LaTeX'ed IPA or if necessary, SAMPA.
I guess I should put my code where my mouth is and learn more about how
the math TeX extensions work with the Wikipedia back end and make it go
myself. In my copious free time.
On a mostly unrelated-note, perhaps explaining my obsession with the
topic, I work for a company that makes TTS (Speech Synthesis) software.
I work with phonetic representations of words all day long. Something
that might be cool for some pages on Wikipedia and definitely for all of
Wiktionary would be to have TTS-generated samples of how things are
pronounced. And before you complain about how robotic and wobbly TTS
sounds, you should listen to some of the most modern voices out there.
They sound very natural. Check out [[Speech synthesis]] for a list of
good voices with free web demos. We could probably negotiate a deal with
one of the companies wherein we include their TTS samples in the
Wikipedia in exchange for clearly marking where the TTS samples came
from. Since it costs virtually nothing to generate the samples, it would
be essentially free advertising for the company. And for all the people
who see pronunciation schemes as indecipherable Greek, a good sound
sample clarifies any phonetic confusion, and doesn't force poor
Wikipedia users to listen to crappy home recordings of our geeky voices.
Cheers! - David [[User:Nohat]]
Steve Vertigum wrote:
This is probably the most well thought out addressing
of this issue ever done on wp. I must say this is
impressive and inline with the consensus of
No unicode IPA on IE?? Hmm. Well, considering the
expensive workarounds you listed -- as necessary to
accomodate IE users -- for a fix that entirely in
Microsoft's domain, I would lean toward calling the
IPA Unicode as "standard" anyway, and let the ?? or
Xboxes be the problem of the IE end user. This is
already the case for any character sets that arent
loaded up anyway -- (I have yet to load a Hindi
character set for example. ;) Soon afterward someone
will write a hack to accomodate IE no doubt, but
theres no reason not to push the Unicode IPA as the
standard right now.
But that still doesnt deal with the problem of easy
input via a Roman character set. A little conversion
hack from the pseudovalues (/s/) to their IPA
equvalents should be a first priority , and I would do
it myself if I had the time, or could program a little
better (late bloomer ok..)
As always with apologies to the hackers,
-S-