Macron Use

Notes about Macron support issues and solutions for handling them

Issues

• macrons not ASCII or ISO 8859-1
• maori an official language as of 1987
• searching is a problem (store as macron replace on the way out)
• browser behaviour unpredictable
• interchange between client/server apps and web

Options

• doubling the long vowels (maaori)
• use of Umlaut - not acceptable in Maori
• named entity encoded (e.g. ā) - Good support, and 7bit ASCII but difficult for authors
• Unicode encoding (UTF8/16) - system/storage interchange and browser support issues
• font substitution (static or dynmic) - fragile
• avoidance

Reccommended Solution

• store as unicode
• render as HTML entities for browsers
• vary output depending on browser capability

References

• http://www.tpk.govt.nz/using/macron_paper/index.html
• http://webteam.waikato.ac.nz/guidelines/macron_utf.shtml

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See Also: Web Publishing | Web Development | Notes Index

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