Re: Arabic letters separated by markup

[I'm not on the www-style list.]

fantasai wrote:
>  For characters within the same inline sequence.
> 
>   1. Shaping and joining behavior MUST NOT be affected by element
>      boundaries.

If the CSS "display" property is set to "none" for a particular element, 
then perhaps the characters in adjacent displayable elements should not 
be joined to the characters in the "display: none" element.

(Maybe you already thought of this, and that is what is meant by "same 
inline sequence"?)

>   4. Obligatory ligatures MUST NOT be broken if the formatting rules
>      introduce no extra space between the affected characters, even
>      if this means some of the characters are rendered in the wrong
>      font or as part of the wrong visual element.

Perhaps the spec could say that an implementation MAY honor such things 
as a color change (which may not be possible in current font 
technologies such as OpenType?) or MAY instead use the isolated forms of 
the individual characters. I don't know whether the obligatory ligature 
rules should trump the style rules.

>   5. Combining characters MUST be rendered as the combined grapheme
>      cluster if the system is capable of rendering the combination,
>      even if this means some of the characters are rendered in the
>      wrong font or as part of the wrong visual element. The combined
>      grapheme cluster SHOULD be rendered as part of the base
>      character's element, or, in the case of combining jamos, the
>      initial character's element.

Here again, shouldn't the style rules trump the Unicode rules? 
Otherwise, why should we even allow tags to be inserted between such 
characters?

Erik

Received on Monday, 13 June 2005 17:08:47 UTC