12.9.2011 18:19, Philippe Verdy wrote:
Yes, but some web browsers like Firefox automatically apply an `fl'
ligature...
Well, not just Firefox, because Chrome is now doing the same thing for
this message !
Can you give more details? I just checked that my Chrome (Win 7) is
up-to-date and tested with a simple document, and it did not apply any
ligatures (for fi or fl). As far as I know, Firefox has applied
ligatures for some time _but_ only for some font face and size
combinations by default and controllable by the CSS property
text-rendering. I still think it was a bad move to start applying
ligatures by default on the web where none were applied so far.
> And unconditionally (ignoring the HTML page content
language, if it's set to German).
Sadly enough, web browsers generally ignore language markup, just as
search engines do. Probably largely because a) there is so often wrong
information in such markup and b) for any page of nontrivial size in
terms of amount of text, the language can be reasonably well and
efficiently inferred from the context itself automatically.
> With the ligatures generated by default, now documents need to use
> ZWNJ instead if those ligatures are not suitable...
I'm afraid so. On the other hand, you can do that with client-side
JavaScript fairly easily. However, I'm not quite sure whether all
relevant browsers can deal with ZWNJ, at least in the sense of ignoring
it, instead of doing something stupid like displaying a symbol of an
unrepresentable glyph. I guess this revolves around IE 6 - can we ignore
it? (Notes on using ZWNJ on web pages:
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/nobr.html#zwsp )
--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
