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?