December 7, 2001
Untitled
Following up on my post about using proper ligatures on web pages, eagle-eyed blog scout Jerry Kindall brought up a couple of very good points. Points which had been completely obscured by my own typographically-induced fog of discovery:
“[Using ligatures makes] it nigh-impossible to search for words like “aesthetic”on your site, should one want [or] need to.”
Indeed. Even though some search engines such as Google can apparently understand, properly encode as a query, and then return search results for a given ligature-ensconced term, they do not automatically make the connection that “æsthetic” is the same as “aesthetic”. Therein lies the problem.
“…we could get Web browsers to start using ATSUI (Apple Text Services for Unicode Imaging), which can automatically display ligature glyphs where appropriate without changing the underlying text. But that seems a long shot. Or maybe browsers and search engines could be smart enough to know that “ae” really means (ae|æ), but doing that for every possible accented letter or ligature would be a pain and it would probably end up being inconsistent and confusing across various search engines.”
Sigh. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. I’ve been tossing around a few solutions on how to get around this limitation in how search engines index the content on the page. One possibility would be to wrap each of the words containing a ligature with an anchor tag that included either a name or id attribute. The word æsthetic could be coded as <a name=”aesthetic”>æsthetic</a> or <a id=”aesthetic”>æsthetic</a> as an example. However, I am unsure as to whether search engines even index the text contained in these types of attributes. Perhaps the title attribute is a better place to put this since it is meant to be a form of alternate and additionally descriptive text. This is how Mark Newhouse over at iBlog handles inline definitions. By placing the alternate text or definition in the title attribute of a span, the user can obtain additional clarity on a given term — like this: æsthetic. Maybe the search engine would take this hint as well. Any other thoughts on this?
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