[charmod-norm] Arabic presentation forms not for showing composed forms (#189)

r12a has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/charmod-norm:

== Arabic presentation forms not for showing composed forms ==
Just above https://w3c.github.io/charmod-norm/#bidiCompatibilityExample
> Today these compatibility forms mainly are used to show the composed form in isolation on the page (to illustrate the shapes of the character without joining to another character in a word).

I've been giving charmod-norm one last read and suddenly noticed this for the first time. I don't think we should appear to be suggesting a use for these presentation characters for composed forms in isolation. If you need to show composed forms in isolation, ZWJ exists for that, and is likely to produce better results for at least two reasons: (a) because you can't rely on all fallback fonts to support presentation forms, (b) because the text you use is still machine readable and searchable.

I'd suggest either just dropping the sentence, or replacing it with something like "These presentation forms are intended to only support round-trip encoding conversions."

I'll drop a couple more comments in issues, but they should all be small editorial nits, don't worry.


Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/charmod-norm/issues/189 using your GitHub account

Received on Thursday, 17 January 2019 17:31:43 UTC