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

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

--- Comment #8 from Aryeh Gregor <ayg@aryeh.name> 2011-09-26 22:03:50 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #4)
> If people who work on the relevant parts of rendering engines want to treat
> this as a supported feature, the validator should get out of the way.

Comment #0 says it already works in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.  (I didn't test
it myself.)

> What use cases are there for coloring different parts of the grapheme
> cluster differently?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Example_of_biblical_Hebrew_trope.svg

The image highlights the diacritical marks to distinguish them from the main
letters, and gives them different colors to distinguish vowels from
cantillation marks.  I've also seen the vowel mark sheva bolded independent of
the letter it's under to signify that it's a sheva na instead of a sheva nach,
a distinction that matters for pronunciation but which traditional Hebrew
orthography doesn't make.

More theoretically, I could definitely imagine that it would be useful
occasionally to emphasize a specific vowel mark in a Hebrew word.  Vowelized
Hebrew can sometimes have three or four marks per letter, especially Biblical
Hebrew.  If you're contrasting two words that differ only in diacritics, you
need to actively draw the reader's attention to the difference if you want them
to spot it.  I haven't personally seen this done, though.

Suffice it to say, there are definitely use-cases in Hebrew to be able to color
or bold diacritics separately from the letter they're on.  It's not needed for
normal typography or anything, though, more of a "nice to have" thing.

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Received on Monday, 26 September 2011 22:03:54 UTC