I have been working on making sure that pages containing IPA characters can be viewed as easily as possible. However, it seems there is something about the default skin that makes it impossible to render IPA characters correctly in Internet Explorer. It seems no matter what fonts I choose in Tools->Internet Options...->Fonts... the IPA characters always appear as boxes. See this example page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_words_of_disputed_pronunciation
When I view that page after logging in and selecting a different skin, such as Classic, the font preferences seem to kick in and the characters display fine. I'm having trouble figuring out exactly what it is, due to the complex CSS that spans several files.
Can anyone else replicate this problem? I want to write a help page to link to in the {{IPA}} template so that IE users can set their browsers to view the characters with a minimum of fuss. At the moment, the amount of fuss required to view the characters in IE is not minimal.
- David [[User:Nohat]]
P.S. I have been running into lots and lots of font tags that make our output invalid XHTML but would be valid if they were span tags, but of course can't be span tags because span tags are forbidden. Can we PLEASE allow span tags so that we can begin the process of making Wikipedia pages be valid XHTML?