James Cummings wrote:
So what is best? Obviously encoding your webpages as (say) UTF-8 is a good start. Force user to download a font for your site with appropriate glyphs? Use images of the glyphs instead of actual characters(*shudder*)? Transliterate into ascii characters/editorial marks? Use markup to allow easy replacement of different solutions on the fly?
I have my own preferences but am interested in what other people have done.
Many factors may come into play in this decision, including not just current functionality, but (I would hope for anyone putting much time and energy into a scholarly project) a plan for future accessibility of the data--humanities projects have, or should have, a long time horizon of usabilty, whatever the publication mode.
From the latter point of view as much as or more than the former, and because we are recording a variety of glyphs in our manuscript that are not (currently?) in Unicode, I have taken the tack in the transcription part of my current project of recording every manuscript glyph using an XML entity (here I simplify slightly). It's easy (here I simplify a bit more) to replace these entities on the fly with Unicode characters, transliterations into ASCII with editorial markup, or whatever, and they're reasonably convenient to deal with in writing things like search routines. Make the raw file look like doggy doo-doo, of course:
Murray McGillivray