Re: Armenian numbering: findings, recommendations and request to CSS

fantasai wrote:
>
> Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
>>
>> fantasai 2009-02-13 20.32:
>>
>>> alpha("a-z")
>>> alpha("a-f,q-z")
>>> alpha("do,re,mi,fa,so,la,ti")
>>
>> Do you use 'alpha' for "latin alphabet"? Or could alpha be used for 
>> Cyrillic as well?
>
> alpha() is simply functional notation. What characters you put in its
> argument is unrelated to its name. I chose alpha() rather than something
> else because it is alphabetic systems that we are discussing here. See
> http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-lists/#numeric
>
such a mechanism would be very useful.


Although one thing I'd like to see is a mechanism, e.g. doublealpha()  
or some extension to alpha(), to handle the perculiarities of nested 
Burmese alphabetic lists, where the consonant is doubled, so first item 
in a nested list (i.e. a list within a list) would be ကက, second item 
would be ခ ခ, the third would be ဂ ဂ, etc. I'm not sure how many other 
languages use a similar approach, but the doubling of consonants can be 
observed in official Burmese documents in nested lists.
>> If you are taking your pattern from the way RegEx/GREP is working, 
>> then remember that e.g. \p{Armenian} matches any character in the 
>> Armenian block.[1]
>>
>> Hence e.g.
>>             alpha(armenian)
>> could also be useful.
>
> For a lot of languages this might wind up matching various bits of
> punctuation and other characters that aren't quite letters.
>
>> Btw, why did you pick "alpha"? Why not "numb"? Or do you think that 
>> e.g. pure symbols should be excluded or have another name?
>
> If we needed numeric(), it would treat the first character as a
> zero value. I'm happy to just add keywords for the numeric systems,
> however. There are vastly fewer permutations of them. Afaict, given
> the way they've encoded Persian separate from Arabic-Indic, none
> in fact.
>
Shan digits would be useful.

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