Deprecated Arabic presentation forms considered helpful

[ntounsi]

Dear all,

When styling Arabic letters within a word (e.g. with colors), they may not join in some rendering tools. For example, in Firefox letters joins but not in Safari or Chrome.
Arabic Presentation Forms-B (U+FE70..U+FEFF) or Arabic Presentation Forms-A (U+FB50..U+FDFF), are deprecated but may helps solve this problem.
Please see the example here:
http://www.w3c.org.ma/Tests/joiningColoredLetters.html
where deprecated contextual letters, or deprecated ligature character are used (case 4 and 5).

Opinion?

Najib

[shervinafshar]

We talked about this in the meeting and think that it would be a good idea to mention these characters and their deprecated nature, but point out the common mistakes which happen because of bad software or not being aware of the nature of these characters or the correct way of doing some of the use-cases (e.g. multi-color joining characters).

[ntounsi]

Dear all,

I put a draft at http://www.w3c.org.ma/Tests/Deprec/issue32-deprecatedForms.html
for discussion. The idea is to enumerate some pros and cons.

Najib.

[shervinafshar]

We are going to discuss this during our meeting next week.

[behnam]

Proposed content is now here: https://github.com/w3c/alreq/wiki/Deprecated-Arabic-presentation-forms-considered-helpful

[khaledhosny]

I think the right way to force a joining form is to use ZWJ. Presentation forms really should be avoided, they break text semantics (indexing, search, etc.), it would be quit harmful to advocate using them.

[shervinafshar]

@khaledhosny, I guess most of us agree with you about that. The section discussing the presentation form is not going to be in the document. It rather would be a separate document by Najib discussing the issues around these forms. He might choose to work on the draft in the wiki page here.