I did not notice that the discussion about Hebrew holam male wasWell, it wasn't very releated - although the subject line here "line initial holam plus alef" reminds me that it is very near to where we started this thread.
related.
In fact I don't know anything about the hebrew alphabet so I could not
understand the semantics discussed, and so di not note that <holam, vav>
was a "defective" encoding (in terms of combining sequences).
My latest idea is to use RLM as in effect your "invisible RTL letter". So I would encode word or line initial holam male as <RLM, holam, vav>. This is technically a defective combining sequence (is that correct?), as RLM is a format control character, but the RLM has the double effect of keeping the holam separate from any spaces which a higher level protocol might put there and ensuring RTL directionality. And I suppose the same technique would be legal with any combining character. But of course it would all be spoiled if XML were to forbid defective combining sequences, which fortunately is unlikely. Actually I suppose you could use <RLM, space, combining character> or <LRM...> for your spacing diacritics as the RLM or LRM would protect the space from combination with any previous space etc. Or perhaps <RLM, NBSP, combining character>. As RLM effectively disappears in searches etc, in effect you have your compatibility decomposition.When using the term "forbidden", it was only related to possible security problems with XML, but the term was certainly too much expeditive. However, given that possible security and parsing issues do exist, the case of <holam, vav> used to encode "holam-male" may be another argument to propose a neutral/invisible base character for combining characters. For the case of Hebrew, it then needs to have a "letter" behavior, but for the case of other isolated diacritics in Latin,Greek Cyrillic, and probably also Hiragana, Katakana (voice marks) it should better be handled as a symbol.
I suggested several semantics for this invisible character(s) in a earlier message: - A invisible symbol - An invisible LTR letter - An invisible RTL letter all of them having a *compatibility* decomposition (or NFKD form) as a SPACE like other existing spacing combining marks, but not being canonical equivalent of SPACE (to keep separately the legacy semantics, properties, behavior and known caveats unchanged and implementation/usage-dependant, as they are now with SPACE+NSM which could then be discouraged in Unicode and strongly deprecated in SGML/HTML/XML)
I note that there is no line break opportunity in <space, NBSP>. But is there one after the space in <space, RLM, NBSP>? If so, <RLM, NBSP, combining character> has a third advantage, that it gives the right line break opportunity when this sequence is word initial, which it wouldn't do without the RLM.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
