[Bug 13502] Text run starting with composing character should be valid

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13502

--- Comment #12 from Shai Berger <shai@platonix.com> 2011-09-27 07:22:01 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #11)
> Test case:
> 
> data:text/html,<!doctype html>
> <span style=font-size:7em>
> <span style=color:blue>&%23x05de;</span>&%23x0592;
> &%23x05de;&%23x0592;
> </span>
> 
> [...] Opera 11.50 displays the diacritic in the
> first cluster as a box, refusing to combine it with the different-colored
> character.
> 
> This demonstrates that two major browsers already behave as desired in the
> cases we're interested in.

This is quite odd. While I see the same results for your test case
(unsurprisingly, I'm also running Ubuntu 11.04 and Opera 11.51), Opera does
render diacritics with different color and font-weight in my example document
(http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/attachment.cgi?id=973 which I have already
linked above). I have tried to play a little with the data: test to make it
more like my code, with no luck.  However, as my test document shows, the
desired behavior is actually supported in all major browsers except IE.

> It's useful functionality, and there's no reason
> for the spec to make it invalid.  It might be that there are some cases where
> styling the diacritic differently from the base character makes no sense, but
> in some cases it does -- don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.  If you
> can identify specific markup that definitely doesn't make sense, make that
> specific markup invalid.
> 

I agree, of course.

> What does "If the use case is just colouring accents, then IMHO CSS should
> support that directly" mean?  I gave two real-world use-cases in comment 8, and
> both of them require being able to style some diacritics on a letter
> differently than others. A CSS property like diacritic-color or whatever would
> not serve the use-cases.  It has to be possible to identify individual
> diacritics to style, and the only way to do that is to put tags in the markup.

I agree. As an example, in the Hebrew word &#1502;&#1489;&#1513;&#1500;
("mevashel", cooking) proper voweling puts three different "diacritics" on the
third letter (&#1513;&#1473;&#1468;&#1461; – a diacritic dot on the top right
marking the letter as "shin" and not "sin", a point in the middle that is like
doubling a consonant in English, and the pair of dots at the bottom which are
the vowel e). This is a common everyday word, not some contrived biblical
example.

As a side point, the phrasing of the correction in the patch still allows for
the "cheating" method I used to pacify the validator: make the text node begin
with a RLM followed immediately by a combining character. All major browsers
(except IE) then combine the combining character with the last character of the
preceding text node, where that is possible.

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Received on Tuesday, 27 September 2011 07:22:06 UTC