Minor update to the Phonetica Latinae site
I did a minor update to the Phonetica Latinae site. Before, the IPA symbols were displayed by IE as a square in the pages. I did a bit experiment to find out the reason, it seems that IE 6 has a wrong interpretation( or inconsistent with Firefox or Opera) of font family lists. For example, font-family: Verdana, "Arial Unicode MS", the Arial Unicode MS font is for displaying IPA symbols, in other standard browsers, if they can’t find a character in the first font Verdana, they’ll fall into the second font. However, it seems that IE omits the second font even IPA symbols are not included in the first font.
I think it’s a long known issue, which is one of many of IE’s bugs. Just knew that the final version of IE 7 will be released later this month, so… I think this shouldn’t be a big problem any more.
Then, there’s another problem in IE 6 sp2, which seems to be more problematic. I used flash objects to load mp3 sound clips, and obviously it takes IE too long to render that it simply stops responding when there are too many (>50 on my computer) flash objects on the same page. Can this be due to the new added “Click-to-activate” feature of activex objects in IE? That is, a user needs to click on an ActiveX object(eg. flash) before interacting with it. My solution now is simply turn off the online-playing function on IE if there are more than 40 sound clips in a page, and before I figure out, the users may need to use Firefox or Opera to view the site for best experiences.
Update: Thanks to Leendert’s comment, I’ve added the ability of ajusting font-size in the page, try it out…
Hello,
You have a beautiful designed site and I like to make a few suggestions to make it even better.
1. Make font-sizes relative. Looking at e.g. phlatina/s/style.css I see that you use absolute font-sizes (px). That is a no-no in webdesign. The default font-size of the user’s browser is always right (think e.g. usability, or visually impaired people). Font-sizes are better expressed as “em” or “%” to make them relative to the browsers default font-size.
2. On Phonetica Latinae, several links point to “scientificnames.html” while the filename is actually “scientificname.html”. BTW, if you fix this by only renaming the file, you might break other links.
3. Sound-files on Phonetica Latinae: you have a pleasant voice, but I have to change the sound-volume quite often. Would it be difficult to make the sound-files so that each file produces the same sound-volume compared to the others?
Regards,
Leendert Meyer
hi hi!! Finally! someone posted some suggestions on the site’s design … Thank you very much for the valuable thoughts. Yeah… font size is very tricky, I’ve thought about using ems, but then I read on a book that ems can also cause inconsistency in mac browsers? Since I don’t have Mac, so I’m not sure if I want to use ems or percentage. Plus, in firefox and opera , the absolute font sizes can be ajusted, so… dunno…
ohhhhhhhhhhh, purals ! hate it!! yes yes, i’ll change them back, it’s easy to use search and replace ahahahaha…
It’s so embarrased for the sound files… there’s something wrong with my headset, so all volumes sound like low here… I’ll find a software to adjust them.
Thank you again! Good day!
Good post! I plan to move into this stuff after I’m done with school, as most of it is time consuming. It’s a great post to reference back to. My blog needs more time to gain in popularity anyway.