Mike Ayers wrote at 11:06 AM on Thursday, September 9, 2004: >>Does the issue of markup colors vs. font colors even fall on Unicode ground? >> > No, it shouldn't. Unicode deals with characters, not parts of >characters, despite making use of character composition to form some of >those characters. As such, getting involved in sub-character issues, such >as how to color parts of characters, is out of scope. That's how I see it. >But of course, my vision doesn't mean much. What does the UTC see? Is this >still then an undecided issue?
But this goes back to a serious mistake made long ago by Unicode when encoding, e.g., Hebrew. The vowel points in Hebrew are CHARACTERS, they are NOT the logical equivalent to Latin accents, for example, even though they may seem to superficially resemble them to non-Hebraists. They are not dependent, or "sub-", characters - they are full fledged characters that just happen to be written above, in, and under the consonants. They are, for example, actually read sequentially and discreetly and at times independently. But Unicode strapped these Hebrew vowel points with the combining mark property, thus making them dependent on base characters; and here we are, stuck with a wrong-headed "legacy" with all its concomitant problems. My thinking is that Unicode created and perpetuates this problem, so Unicode must come up with a solution for it. Therefore it DOES "fall on Unicode ground." I'm way too busy right now to devote any time to this, but I would suggest that Unicode put ALL Hebrew proposals that intersect this issue on hiatus until the Hebrew and Unicode experts on the Hebrew email list (and elsewhere) come up with long term strategies for dealing with this central issue. We don't need a continuing stream of ad hoc bandages and bailing wire to mask a fundamental design flaw. I have a feeling that some time in the future the Unicode encoding of Hebrew vowels will have to be relegated to legacy status and be completely re-done, abandoning the combining mark fiasco. Respectfully, Dean A. Snyder Assistant Research Scholar Manager, Digital Hammurabi Project Computer Science Department Whiting School of Engineering 218C New Engineering Building 3400 North Charles Street Johns Hopkins University Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218 office: 410 516-6850 cell: 717 817-4897 www.jhu.edu/digitalhammurabi
