I18N-ISSUE-278: Characters vs code points

I18N-ISSUE-278: Characters vs code points

http://www.w3.org/International/track/issues/278

Raised by: Richard Ishida
On product: 

http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-writing-modes/#text-combine-horizontal0
Example 20

"Note that the number of characters ≠ number of Unicode codepoints!"

That is a very strange thing to say, since by definition Unicode codepoints are equivalent to characters.

I assume that you mean that non-spacing combining characters don't take up any horizontal space, and so you might have more characters than graphemes. If so, perhaps you should say that?

This is a particularly problematic example of the approach "For readability, the term character is used in place of extended grapheme cluster in this section."  The Character Model says "Specifications SHOULD use specific terms, when available, instead of the general term 'character'." (http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/#C067). I think that would help here, and probably elsewhere in the document.

Received on Monday, 22 July 2013 17:42:46 UTC