w3c / w3c/afrlreq

Is zero-width space problematic for cursive African scripts?

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Dominant language
HTML
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Forks
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Description

This relates to the CSS discussion at ​https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/3861, which discusses whether there are any unexpected implications to the fact that ZWSP shouldn't break joining behaviour.

The first question is whether ZWSP is actually used in these scripts (which include N'Ko, Adlam, and ajami orthographies). If not, there's no real question to answer.

There are some suggestions that ZWSP may be introduced as a workaround by authors for practical reasons such as to break long words, urls, etc. without hyphens. In this case, then one would expect ZWSP not to break the cursive joining (it currently does in Firefox and Edge).

My expectation is that this is not really an issue for these scripts.

Contributor guide

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First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the linked CSS discussion at w3c/csswg-drafts#3861 and investigate whether ZWSP is used in N'Ko, Adlam, or ajami orthographies. Compare the expected joining behavior with the behavior reported in Firefox and Edge. Done means documenting whether these scripts use ZWSP and whether the observed behavior has practical implications.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
css
Domain
internationalization
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
30/100

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