Michael Jansson wrote: > > Marco Cimarosti wrote: > > > A variant of approach 2) is to support pre-composed Unicode > > > text, e.g. > > > > If I understand what you mean, I totally disagree. > > I am not proposing using PUA or introducing new code points > to do this. You would still have valid Unicode characters > in the page (of sorts). The characters would be ordered > visually though,
That is what I understood. And I still *totally* disagree. Logical order is not an optional feature of Unicode: it is mandatory. Transmitting text in visual order is simply not Unicode: it is a hack for which you'd better chose another name. > and contain extra information > to let the user agent (the browser, a.k.a. 'ua') know which > alternate form to use for a character. It sounds totally useless: this extra information is already implicitly contained in the text, and it is called "context". If the browser (or "ua") contains a properly implemented display engine, including a proper Bidi Algorithm, this extra information is totally redundant. Whether or not this display engine will use embedded fonts, is a totally different issue. > [...] The downside is that you would have visually ordered > Unicode text. Sorry. The downside is that it would not be "Unicode". > This is less than ideal of course, [...] Much less than ideal, in fact: it is a poor hack. > > Of course, you do need a "code point" for any glyph, but that > > would be just > > an internal "glyph ID": a private convention bound to a > > certain font format, > > which would not affect the way the document is encoded and > > transmitted. > > I don't see why you need code points in this case. A ua can > easily render text with nothing but glyph index as input, Of course it can. But I fail to see why you want to call it a "Unicode" ua. > > Mapping a string of code points to a string of glyph ID's was > > relatively > > easy; mapping the other way round proved quite tricky. > > > > I still think this backward mapping is possible (or else > > we'll never see an > > Indic OCR), but so far haven't succeeded doing it myself. > > It's not impossible, so keep going... After you showed me the evil such a thing could do in the wrong hands, the idea suddenly becomes much less appealing! _ Marco
