What is missing here is the recognition that having a *standard*
way of expressing such features ("text scoring") is desirable. Suggesting
that this be left of one-off implementations or "some markup language"
is not helpful to people interested in using such features.
What is, of course. equally lacking is the shared understanding
that Unicode is not the proper *standard* to hang this on. Adding
scoping undermines the plain text nature of Unicode
and turns it into its own markup language.
Assuming text scoring is indeed rather widespread, and
used in a variety of contexts, then the proper place to seek
for a common and standardized solution would be a text-styling
standard such as CSS.
I believe it would be helpful if, in addition to whatever requests
that individual proponents are making directly to the CSS working
group, if the UTC were to communicate clearly to the CSS working
group about features that had been requested but were ruled to
lie outside the scope of character encoding.
From Unicode's perspective, it would be an advantage to be able
to point users to an existing solution on the markup level, instead of
merely positing that one "ought to exist".
Therefore, I would consider it in the UTCs own best interest if
if could utilize whatever liaison relationship exists to alert groups
like CSS about such missing pieces in the overall text architecture.
This would be a much better model of cooperation than what has
existed heretofore where both sets of committees work entirely
on their own and UTR#20 attempts, after the fact, to unravel
the resulting incompatibilities.
A./
On 11/18/2011 5:58 PM, Ken Whistler wrote:
On 11/18/2011 5:36 PM, Philippe Verdy wrote:
I have absolutely no clear way to represent sequences like in this
example that use such elongated diacritic applied to runs of more than
two characters.
Nor should you expect to be able to represent such things in plain
text. Such
conventions are not appropriate to plain text. As usual, your regular
alternatives
are:
1. represent the content with structured markup, or
2. represent the presentation with pdf (or similar)
Expecting out-of-the box rendering engines to link the two
automatically is
unreasonable, IMO.
Of course I can still use two half marks in the
plain-text (only on the first and last letter), but what does happen
if I cannot (and in fact don't) mark their joining above intermediate
letters ?
You'll get *both* bad representation of the content and bad presentation
of the appearance. Such a deal!
--Ken
