haskellfoundation / haskellfoundation/haskell-2010-revised-report

Unicode characters in HTML are hard to search

Open Beginner friendly
#69 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub
bug output: html
Dominant language
Typst
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4d 18h
Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

I was just looking at the HTML version of the revised report and discovered the use of special typographic Unicode characters makes searching hard.

For example, searching for 'var' on the [syntax reference page](https://haskell.foundation/haskell-2010-revised-report/syntax-reference.html) does not yield the varid definition because it uses the italic Unicode '𝑣𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑑'. My browser (LibreWolf, a Firefox derivative) does not find '𝑣𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑑' when searching for 'var'.

I think it is better for accessibility to use HTML formatting like `varid` instead of using Unicode for formatting like this.

The same thing happens with monospace Unicode like '𝚌𝚊𝚜𝚎'.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start with the HTML syntax reference page linked in the issue and inspect how italic and monospace terms such as “varid” and “case” are represented. Confirm that formatting is provided by HTML rather than Unicode styling, then verify that browser searches for the plain-text terms find the definitions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
html
Domain
accessibility, documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
2/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Activity status
Active
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
76/100

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