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

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Tue Dec 09 2003 - 06:41:36 EST

  • Next message: Peter Kirk: "Re: [OT]"

    Peter Kirk writes:
    > Philippe, you have now stated this (several times). But just a day
    > earlier you yourself stated that the rule forbidding combining marks at
    > the start of a string would never be relaxed because it is fundamental
    > to the XML containment model. You don't usually contradict yourself
    > quite so obviously.

    I don't know how you interpreted what I may have said a few days before.
    I have certainly not said that XML forbids combining marks at the start
    of XML, just that W3C does not _recommand_ it as well as any other
    defective combining sequences, as they are known to cause problems
    (for example when it's difficult to track the effective text file type)

    That's the same for NFC: it's just a recommandation, not a requirement,
    and for XML there are no such "canonical equivalents", just distinct
    strings. It's up to the application using the _parsed_ XML document
    tree to do, if needed, the normalization steps. But this should occur
    only _after_ the document has been parsed and possibly validated
    according to its schema.

    Generally, noramlization of strings will only occur in the very last
    step just before output the result (for example for font rendering),
    but even at this step, the font may provide information which may
    require glyph processing or character substitutions that is not well
    performed with just a normalized NFC form. So in fact, the XML
    application can/should perform its own necessary normalizations only
    at steps where it has a benefit, but not at the file stream level as
    the XML stream itself is not plain text.

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