From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sun Dec 07 2003 - 15:10:16 EST
Peter Kirk writes:
> A very tentative suggestion for some glue: a character which can take
> combining marks but whose function is to throw those marks back on to
> the preceding base character, preceding any markup. This would have to
> be a zero width base character, not a format character or a combining
> mark to avoid defective sequences; it would also have to be default
> ignorable. Or maybe there is an existing character which can be reused
> e.g. WJ (same counterarguments as recently on the bidi list of course).
> A very simple implementation could use the backspacing trick Philippe
> used to position the diacritics roughly. A more adequate one would be a
> difficult problem for font developers, but one that is soluble in
> principle.
The glue seems good in apparence but much too complex to implement in
Unicode. I do think that specific occurences of compelx styles must be
handled with a stylesheet, where any given grapheme cluster is applied a
composite style as a whole.
So my best choice, to represent such a thing like a i with a distinct
style for the i would be something like:
<span class="styled-i">i</span>
and then leave all the complex styling of this "i" be enterily specified
by the "styled-i" class defined in the stylesheet.
The stylesheet could then completely ignore what is really encoded in
the middle of the <span> element, and could work completely with
glyphic specifications, which could for example take the dotless i and
a dot above diacritic glyphs to rebuild this character.
However, if a document needs many occurences of such style, it would be
interesting to be able to define a style to apply to individual characters
or sequences of characters that occur anywhere in a classed text, so that
you wont need to write:
<span
class="styled-i">i</span>n<span
class="styled-i">i</span>t<span
class="styled-i">a</span>t<span
class="styled-i">i</span>e
but instead just:
<span class="myStyle">initiative</span>
And in the stylesheet, the selector would be something like:
.myStyle#"i" {
compose-mode: replace;
compose-as: above(.dotless-i, .red-dot-above);
}
.dotless-i {
insert-text: "&dotless-i;";
}
.red-dot-above {
insert-text: "&dot-above;";
color: red;
}
Of course such language does not exist for now in CSS, but it would
allow a clear separation of text and style, while not limiting the
kind of style one would like to do (including rendering some text
with images or objects and active scripts).
But all this is out of scope of Unicode. Such things should be
requested to the W3C as an enhancement proposal in CSS to allow
styling only small fragments of text found in text elements
(with fragments initially specified as characters or strings of
characters, or possibly as regular expressions to match items
for which complex style is needed)...
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