[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 10874] lang, xml:lang, content-language ignored when choosing fonts

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10874





------- Comment #8 from robburns1 at mac.com  2007-08-22 11:53 PDT -------
(In reply to comment #7)
> This is actually a bug in Unicode. You should report it there.  But we need to
> fix it in webkit too.

I'm not so sure it is a bug in Unicode. Unicode has to balance many competing
interests. They unify some things and dis-unify others. The rationale may not
always be clear, but however they handle unification, it doesn't prevent proper
glyph matching and text layout. It simply moves it to the presentation level
(without an underlying character/semantic difference).

> > The issue is that unicode is completely inconsistent. In the beginning they
> represented separated symbols. For instance there is different encodings for
> European numbers and Arabic number even though the meaning are the same, they
> are separated because the symbols are different. This made Unicode usefull for
> encoding fonts. But when the same type of issues appears in Asian scripts,
> Unicode changes and decides on encoding semantics instead of symbols, so
> suddenly the one unicode-character has several different graphical symbol.

This is actually one of the *features* of Unicode. Separating the semantics
from the presentation or the model from the view.

> Btw. Another place language is needed is in correct capitalization (like CSS
> text-transform). In Turkish a small 'i' needs to be capitalized to a big
> İ(dot over I), and a large 'I' to be lower-cased to 'ı' (i with no
> dot).

This is actually a better example where glyphs should be different depending on
the language settings. These CSS text transforms should be language aware for
glyph selection.

In the case of Han unification, the webpage author should select a suitable
font to display the Han characters with the desired glyphs.  The font the
author selects will already be language dependent.

However, WebKit (and the various text systems it uses) should be language aware
in it's glyph fallback selection. That is when the fonts specified by the
author are not available, the text system should select the appropriate Han
glyphs from an appropriate font based on the language settings of that run of
text.


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