Re: Hebrew Lists in CSS3

On 02/10/2009 11:41 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Simon Montagu<smontagu@smontagu.org>  wrote:
>> The algorithm for combining is a little tricky: depending on the length of
>> the number string a character needs to be either appended to the string or
>> inserted between the last two characters.
>
> That's true, yeah.  So is this worth speccing?  Is anyone going to use it?
>
>> We will also need to find a
>> solution to the problem of ambiguity between x and x * 1000.
>
> Ah, I see.  I misread the text as specifying that, e.g., 1 is א
> (aleph) and 1000 is א׳ (aleph geresh), so it wouldn't be ambiguous.
> That's what Firefox implements, and it's what I wrote into the
> examples.  I see now that actually you wrote that the geresh is added
> only if there's more than one group, so the current version is
> inconsistent: the examples contradict the prose.

I think it's unclear rather than inconsistent, but the phrasing could 
probably be improved: "more than one group" refers to the decimal 
number. If there are two groups in the decimal number, and the last 
group is "000", there is of course only one group in the Hebrew number.

The ambiguity arises only in the inline case: if Hebrew numbers one 
character long have a geresh appended, 1 will change from א to א׳, which 
will be the same as 1000.

>
> If א׳, ב׳, etc. is undesirable, I suppose we could write תתר, א׳תתר,
> etc.  That would be pretty clear, anyway, although more complicated to
> implement.  I'm not familiar with this method of writing numbers over
> 1000 anyway, so I can't comment on correctness.

Received on Tuesday, 10 February 2009 22:33:19 UTC