> Anyone, please, is it or is it not true that XML forbids, or will forbid > in future versions, combining characters immediately after markup?
XML does not forbid it, it does recommend you avoid it. Charmod defines "include-normalization" and "full-normalization" which go beyond Unicode normalisation in guaranteeing that normalisation will not be altered through various concatenations and inclusions that may occur in the processing of XML data. These do forbid it, though I don't think Charmod insists on their being used. The specification of an application of XML could cite Charmod and insist on include- or full-normalisation. In some cases this would have no real effect (in some data-orientated rather than document-orientated uses of XML), in others it would be a restriction on what could be done in the application. Not forbidding it problems, the most spectacular being the possibility of COMBINING LONG SOLIDUS OVERLAY causing a well-formed XML document to have a canonically equivalent (in both the Unicode and XML concepts of c14n, since the latter makes use of NFC) document that was not well-formed XML. Colouring of diacritics can be performed through other means. <http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/benoit.svg> is an SVG example. This seems a superior method for at least some of the use-cases cited anyway (I've missed some of this thread though). -- Jon Hanna | Toys and books <http://www.hackcraft.net/> | for hospitals: | <http://santa.boards.ie/>
