Re: Coloured diacritics (Was: Transcoding Tamil in the presence of markup)

From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Dec 09 2003 - 13:04:21 EST

  • Next message: Marco Cimarosti: "RE: Text Editors and Canonical Equivalence (was Coloured diacriti cs)"

    On 09/12/2003 06:36, jon@hackcraft.net wrote:

    >Perhaps so does yours. It isn't clear whether the CSS for .red-text would have
    >to over-ride the default behaviour whereby an inline element like <span> is
    >rendered by stacking it to the left or right (depending on text directionality)
    >of the previous inline element or text node, or if the accent should go over
    >the e by default.
    >
    >

    Well, I would put it like this. Consider the following:

    (1) <span class="black-text">{U+00E9}</span>
    (2) <span class="black-text">e{U+0301}</span>
    (3) <span class="black-text">e<span
    class="black-text">{U+0301}</span></span>
    (4) <span class="black-text">e<span class="red-text">{U+0301}</span></span>

    I would expect (1), (2) and (3) to be rendered identically, and (4) to
    differ only in the colour of the accent, just as it would be (apart from
    (1) if U+0301 were replaced by a regular letter. I am assuming nothing
    special defined in the CSS - the behaviour should be the same with a
    simple colour attribute. And so I would expect the behaviour of an
    in-line span element to be subtly different from its normal behaviour
    when the text starts with a combining mark. I think this is what any
    naive user would expect in the circumstances, and is also what is sensible.

    >Briefly testing on a Win2000 box I found that IE6 ignored the styling on the
    >accent, Mozilla1.4 didn't show the accent, and Opera7.2 displayed the red
    >accent (tests had the same results with &#x0301; as with the combining
    >character used directly). It isn't clear to me which, if any, of these are
    >examples of conformant behaviour.
    >
    >
    >
    Looking at existing implementations is a very bad guide to what
    behaviour is actually conformant, sensible, or expected by users. We
    have four independent variables here!

    -- 
    Peter Kirk
    peter@qaya.org (personal)
    peterkirk@qaya.org (work)
    http://www.qaya.org/
    


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