Māori macron characters in XHTML

This also applies to HTML.

Background

New Zealand thankfully seems to be moving away from building web pages using a vowel with a diaeresis (a vowel with a double dot above it), then asking the user to download a modified font which replaces the diaeresis with a macron. I dislike this approach because I think it’s a hack, it can cause problems with laser printers (which have built-in fonts), all pages with diaereses will appear as macrons, and there’s a better way—Unicode.

This Page

My site is in UTF-8, part of the Unicode (ISO 10646) standard, because it makes for easier authoring of web pages—I can type macrons and other high-ASCII characters directly, or copy & paste text from other documents. The macrons occur in the Latin Extended-A set.

While most browsers (Safari and IE) handled this OK, to make it work under Firefox for the Mac and obtain W3C validation I had to fix the HTTP header by adding a .htaccess file for Apache (which my ISP uses):

AddType text/html;charset=UTF-8 html

2005-08. Apache/1.3.26

But

You may want to use HTML character entities (&#nnn;) for a few more years yet, to ensure compatibility with all browsers. This is the approach used by Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori, The Māori Language Commission, though currently not explicity stated.

Viewing this Page under Mac OS X 10.x

Safari’s had support since the public 1.0 beta v51 (well, no surprise there!), including the page title and copying & pasting into TextEdit.

Macron Test Table

If the following table displays macrons your browser is configured correctly:

Unicode Value (‘U+xxxx’)	Letter (sans macron)	Letter with Macron in Your Browser using UTF-8				Letter with Macron in Your Browser using &#
Unicode Value (‘U+xxxx’)	Letter (sans macron)	UTF-8 Sequence	Heading	Normal Text	Fixed Width	HTML Code	Heading	Normal Text	Fixed Width
0100	A	C480	Ā	Ā	Ā	Ā	Ā	Ā	Ā
0101	a	C481	ā	ā	ā	ā	ā	ā	ā
0112	E	C492	Ē	Ē	Ē	Ē	Ē	Ē	Ē
0113	e	C493	ē	ē	ē	ē	ē	ē	ē
012A	I	C4AA	Ī	Ī	Ī	Ī	Ī	Ī	Ī
012B	i	C4AB	ī	ī	ī	ī	ī	ī	ī
014C	O	C58C	Ō	Ō	Ō	Ō	Ō	Ō	Ō
014D	o	C58D	ō	ō	ō	ō	ō	ō	ō
016A	U	C5AA	Ū	Ū	Ū	Ū	Ū	Ū	Ū
016B	u	C5AB	ū	ū	ū	ū	ū	ū	ū

Diaeresis Test Table

If your system has been ‘hacked’ to display diaereses as macrons, you’ll see macrons instead of diaereses in the following table:

HTML Code	Letter	Letter with Diaeresis in Your Browser
HTML Code	Letter	Heading	Normal Text	Fixed Width
Ä	A	Ä	Ä	Ä
ä	a	ä	ä	ä
Ë	E	Ë	Ë	Ë
ë	e	ë	ë	ë
Ï	I	Ï	Ï	Ï
ï	i	ï	ï	ï
Ö	O	Ö	Ö	Ö
ö	o	ö	ö	ö
Ü	U	Ü	Ü	Ü
ü	u	ü	ü	ü