Now my suggestion was the browser program which displays this file should be able to look at the font information in the XML file, open the font file and retrieve the names of all characters in it, so it can show the "&hwesta;" character (and all other characters) without needing a long list of ENTITY entries in the XML.
You are presuming that all fonts contain name strings for glyphs. TrueType fonts with a format 3.0 post table do not. Of course, anyone hoping to take advantage of a system such as you propose would likely not use that format, but it is a mistake to assume the presence of glyph names in a font.
More importantly, what you are proposing -- especially as interpreted by William Overington, below -- is a hack that goes against the driving principles of Unicode text processing and smart font technologies like OpenType.
I am happy to do that, thinking that g_ct would be a suitable name for the golden ligatures ct item.
That name would be interpreted by Adobe's Acrobat glyph->character parser as a ligature of 'g' and some unknown entity called 'ct'. If you're going to give meaningful name to glyphs, I recommend you first learn the conventions that are in use by current software.
But what do you achieve by using Pim's technique to insert your 'golden' (really fatuous name, by the way) ligatures into text? -- even supposing that any browser developer were inclined to implement such a technique, which they will not be. You render text unsearchable and unsortable; you make it impossible to copy and paste text from the page into another document in which you might want to set it in another font. Effectively, you've killed a document in the interests of making it look pretty.
There are technologies that implement the Unicode Standard in a sensible way, that employ smart font technologies to format text in a sophisticated way without destroying the underlying text strings. Yes, it is true that current browsers only widely support such technologies for complex script rendering, but do you really think that browser makers are not going to continue to develop the technologies to which they are already committed, to achieve the kind of goals that you are interested in? Just because something has not been implemented on your computer doesn't mean it has not already been solved by software developers. We have a model that works for rich typography on top of Unicode text processing: it works in my page layout applications, it works in my image editing software, it will eventually work in my web browser.
John Hudson
Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Anyone who has both children and house pets has
surely noticed that the children exposed to language
will develop language, in turn, whereas the house
pets will not.
- Stephen Pinker, on the nature/nurture debate
