Issues in Creating HTML Pages with Welsh or bilingual Content

Dyke, John (2003). Issues in Creating HTML Pages with Welsh or bilingual Content. Technical Report 2003/16; Department of Computing, The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.00016004

Abstract

Using utf-8 encoding web pages in HTML, XHTML or XML can contain all the letters used in Welsh including all of the diacritical marks used. These pages are rendered and display correctly on Microsoft's Internet Explorer from version 4 onwards and Netscape's browser from version 4. Opera supports all of the characters correctly from version 6 albeit with font substitution occurring for some of the less frequently used diacritical marks on w and y: the acen grom, the most frequently used diacritical mark, is rendered correctly. Opera's version 5.12 provides a reasonably good coverage. It displays the vowels a,e,i,o and u correctly with all diacritical marks but renders w, W, y and Y without an acen grom but produces blanks for the other less frequently used diacritical marks used over these characters. For wider support on older browsers, named character entities should be used for the characters a, e, i, o and u with diacritical marks. The remaining vowels w and y should coded either without diacritical marks or by some other representation e.g. the character followed by the diacritical mark (w^ in place of ŵ)The language used on a page should be denoted by using the lang attribute in the HTML mark up. Bilingual pages should have appropriate lang attributes set on section of code (div and span tags can be used to host these attributes if needed)