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This document describes and prioritises gaps for the support of Kashmiri language using the Perso-arabic orthography on the Web and in eBooks. In particular, it is concerned with text layout. It checks that needed features are supported in W3C specifications, in particular HTML and CSS and those relating to digital publications. It also checks whether the features have been implemented in browsers and ereaders. This is a preliminary analysis.
This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at https://www.w3.org/TR/.
This document describes and prioritises gaps for the support of Hungarian on the Web and in eBooks. In particular, it is concerned with text layout. It checks that needed features are supported in W3C specifications, in particular HTML and CSS and those relating to digital publications. It also checks whether the features have been implemented in browsers and ereaders. It is linked to from the language matrix that tracks Web support for many languages.
This document is an individual contribution, and is not currently a work item in any group, however, you can contact the Internationalization Working Group for more information. We welcome contributions to this and/or other documents.
This document was published by the Internationalization Working Group as a Group Draft Note using the Note track.
Group Draft Notes are not endorsed by W3C nor its Members.
This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.
The W3C Patent Policy does not carry any licensing requirements or commitments on this document.
This document is governed by the 12 June 2023 W3C Process Document.
The W3C needs to make sure that the needs of scripts and languages around the world are built in to technologies such as HTML, CSS, SVG, etc. so that Web pages and eBooks can look and behave as people expect around the world.
This page documents difficulties people encounter when trying to use the Kashmiri language with the Perso-arabic script on the Web.
Having identified an issue, it investigates the current status with regards to web specifications and implementations by user agents (browsers, e-readers, etc.), and attempts to prioritise the severity of the issue for web users.
A summary of this report and others can be found as part of the language matrix.
This version of the document is a preliminary analysis
Gap analysis work usually starts with a preliminary analysis, conducted quickly by one or a small group of experts. Then a more detailed analysis is carried out, involving a wider range of experts. The detailed analysis may involve the development of tests, in order to illustrate issues and track results for browsers. The next phase is ongoing maintenance. It is expected that the resulting document will not be frozen: as gaps are fixed, this should be noted in the document. It is also possible that new gaps are noticed or arise, and they can be added to this document when that happens.
This document not only describes gaps, it also attempts to prioritise them in terms of the impact on the local user. The prioritisation is indicated by colour.
Key:
It is important to note that these colours do not indicate to what extent a particular features is broken. They indicate the impact of a broken or missing feature on the content author or end user.
Basic styling is the level that would be generally accepted as sufficient for most Web pages. Advanced level support would include additional features one might expect to include in ebooks or other advanced typographic formats. There may be features of a script or language that are not supported on the Web, but that are not generally regarded as necessary (usually archaic or obscure features). In this case, the feature can be described here, but the status should be marked as OK.
The decision as to what priority level is assigned to a described gap is down to the experts doing the gap analysis. It may not always be straightforward to decide. If a given section in this document refers to more than one feature that is broken, each with different impacts on Web users, the priority for the section should be the lowest denominator.
A cell can be scored as OK if the feature in question is specified in an appropriate specification, and is supported by user agents. A specification that is in CR or later and has two implementations in 'major' browsers will count. This means that the feature may not be supported in all browsers yet. (At some point in the future we may try to distinguish, visually, whether support is available in a specification but still pending in major browsers or applications.)
See also General page layout & progression for features such as column layout, page turning direction, etc. that are affected by text direction.
Are the script requirements for vertically oriented text met? What about if you mix vertical text with scripts that are normally only horizontal? Do you need a switch to use different characters in vertical vs. horizontal text? Does the browser support short runs of horizontal text in vertical lines (tate-chu-yoko in Japanese) as expected? Is the orientation of characters and the directional ordering of characters supported as needed? See available information or check for currently needed data.
This issue is applicable to most languages.
Vertical text may occur for special effects (the spine of a book, table column headings, etc). Typographically, it is simply horizontal text that is rotated. There is no way to do this effectively until browsers support the new CSS properties.
For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap. Please add any discussion there, and not to this issue.
If this script runs right-to-left, are there any issues when handling that? Is bidirectional text adequately supported? What about numbers and expressions? Do the Unicode bidi controls and HTML markup provide the support needed? Is isolation of directional runs problematic? See available information or check for currently needed data.
This issue is applicable to all languages with RTL orthographies.
Style sheets need to add special rules for RTL styles if they are not supported by logical properties or values.
One approach is to create a second style sheet which, when pulled into an HTML page, overrides styles in the main style sheet with settings for RTL text. This approach is not ideal because it requires maintaining the styles in two separate locations, which can therefore get out of synch, and it requires explicit addition of a call to the second style sheet in every page that will support RTL text.
The :dir()
pseudo-class avoids these issues by allowing the content author to include the RTL variations in the same style sheet as the others. However, it is not yet supported by all major browser engines.
A workaround that precedes selectors with :root[dir=rtl] selector_here
can help, but :dir()
is a better way forward. There also appear to be Shadow DOM implications if this is not supported.
:dir
is not interoperably supported by all major browser engines.Can I Use indicates that Gecko supports :dir()
, but Blink, and Webkit do not.
This was confirmed while trying to get this to work recently.
The functionality appears to be available in Blink, but behind a flag.
This simple test below checks whether :dir() causes styling to be changed. The test currently passes for Gecko, but not for Blink or WebKit browsers.
selectors-4 Describes the :dir() feature in CSS. html5 Describes the :dir() feature in HTML.interactive test, The browser supports :dir() selectors.WebKit now supports this selector, as well as Gecko.This pseudo-class significantly improves the process of designing style sheets that can cater for both LTR and RTL pages. It is a valuable enabler for better internationalisation of the Web for the billion or so potential users of RTL scripts. This was therefore marked as Basic.
This issue is applicable to all languages using a right-to-left script.
For support of bidirectional plain text, the Unicode Standard provides a number of formatting characters, which include RLI, LRI, PDI and FSI. See an explanation of how these work.
Although markup should be used most of the time in HTML pages, there are parts of an HTML document that don't support markup, such as the title
element and title
, alt
, and other attributes. These characters can be necessary for managing inline runs of such text.
For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap.
This issue is common to all RTL scripts.
Adoption of logical keywords such as -start
and -end
, rather than -left
and -right
needs to be completed.
For margins, padding, block size, border colour, width & style, logical keywords such as margin-inline-start
or margin-block-end
are widely supported by major browsers in their simplest forms (such as those just mentioned). However, logical properties are not well supported in shorthands such as margin-block
or margin-inline
or the margin
property. The lack of support for shorthands is significant, since they are expected to have high use.
Support for the margin
shorthand is currently held up by a discussion about the appropriate syntax. See this CSS issue.
Other logical properties that are not widely supported include border radius, caption side, and float. Firefox does support border-radius and floats, but otherwise these are not supported.
See a set of test results.
These new values also need to be widely supported in editing applications.
This issue is common to all RTL scripts.
When strings are passed around, some applications don't receive or use information about the appropriate base direction to use for those strings when they are rendered as part of a page.
This can lead to text being incorrectly aligned, and to text within a sentence or paragraph being incorrectly ordered. Some of this can be addressed by using heuristics to detect the direction first-strongly directional character in the string, but some strings can fail such heuristics.
For example, imagine a service which retrieves book names on an English page. If the page retrieves from the database an Arabic book name that begins with LTR letters, it should look like this:
However, if just first-strong heuristics are used to decide the base direction for the inserted book name, it will incorrectly produce:
For these cases the databases or JSON files, etc., from which such strings are pulled need to contain metadata about the base direction which needs to be applied to correct the display. The appropriate direction can be communicated to the backend storage from a form input by using the dirname attribute. This indicates the base direction in force for a form control, whether it is derived from the surrounding text or set manually by the user while typing.
More:
The direction of the field is passed with the form data by Chrome and WebKit, but not by Gecko. Note that Gecko also doesn't change the computed direction of the form field when the user manually sets the direction.Basic, because of its usefulness in ensuring correct directional display of RTL text that starts with a LTR character.i18n test suite HTML5, dirname
Gecko bug (already raised)
All 3 major browser engines, Gecko, Blink, & WebKit, now support relaying the field direction to the server using dirname. It also supports changing the computed direction of a form field when the user manually sets the direction.
Are there any character repertoire issues preventing use of this script on the Web? Do variation selectors need attention? Are there any other encoding-related issues? See available information or check for currently needed data.
No known problems in this area requiring a technical fix, however see the gap report about fonts in Kashmiri. The few available nasta'liq fonts that support Kashmiri often have missing or incorrect glyph to code point assignments, causing authors to use the wrong code points in their content. Some education of authors would also be useful.
Do the standard fallback fonts used in browsers (eg. serif, sans-serif, cursive, etc.) match expectations? Are special font or OpenType features needed for this script that are not available? See available information or check for currently needed data.
This issue is applicable to Kashmiri written with the Perso-arabic script.
Kashmiri is written using the nastaliq style of Arabic writing. However, there are almost no fonts that properly support Kashmiri written in that orthography. (Noto Nastaliq Urdu was only updated in Feb 2022 to support Kashmiri.)
The result of this is that people resort to using inappropriate characters in their text so that the content looks visually more like they are expecting, and even then gaps remain. For example, to make the sukun look like an inverted v rather than a circle, users often use U+065B ARABIC VOWEL SIGN INVERTED SMALL V ABOVE, which is supposed to be used as an African vowel diacritic. There are several such problems in Kashmiri. Lists can be found here and here
Keyboards and input methods also need to be configured to insert the correct characters, but this doesn't help while there are so few fonts available that can display the characters.
This issue is not likely to be fixed by specifications or browser fixes, but does cause a significant constraint for Kashmiris wishing to use the Web.
There is an additional issue, however, related to pre-installed fonts on macOS (see below).
Tests & results:
interactive test, A given font will correctly render characters needed for Kashmiri in the perso-arabic script.
The glyph shapes when the text in the test are displayed should resemble those in the image just below. In particular: farsi yeh with small v above should join to the left; the 4 forms of kashmiri yeh should appear; hamzas should use the round form; the sukun over PA should be an inverted v.
As of March 2022, the latest version of Noto Nastaliq Urdu supports the needed glyphs, if the language is set to 'ks', and displays correctly on Windows10. However, on macOS 12.2.1 the pre-installed version of the font cannot be overwritten and is used to display Kashmiri text in browsers, meaning that there is no support on macOS at the time of writing.
The SIL's Awami Nastaliq font succeeds in correctly rendering all but one feature: the hamza is s-shaped, as used for Urdu, rather than rounded. However, this is a Graphite font, and so only works currently on Gecko browsers.
The Gulmarg Nastaleeq font supports some features in Windows, but appears to not have glyphs for KASHMIRI YEH or for LETTER WAW WITH RING. It also doesn't work on macOS, presumbly for the same reason as the Noto font.
Browser bug reports: Webkit
This covers ways of modifying the glyphs, such as for italicisation, bolding, oblique, etc. Do italic fonts lean in the right direction? Is synthesised italicisation problematic? Are there other problems relating to bolding or italicisation - perhaps relating to generalised assumptions of applicability? See available information or check for currently needed data.
Does the script in question require additional user control features to support alterations to the position or shape of glyphs, for example adjusting the distance between the base text and diacritics, or changing the glyphs used in a systematic way? Do you need to be able to compose/decompose conjuncts, or show characters that are otherwise hidden, etc? See available information or check for currently needed data.
If this script is cursive (eg. Arabic, N’Ko, Syriac, etc), are there problems or needed features related to the handling of cursive text? Do cursive links break if parts of a word are marked up or styled? Do Unicode joiner and non-joiner characters behave as expected? See available information or check for currently needed data.
This issue is applicable to text in all cursive scripts.
When elements surround part of a cursive run of text, and apply styling, the results often break the cursive joins. (See the results of trying to colour individual letters in the illustration below – as expected above, unsuccessful below.)
Specs: After some discussion, the CSS spec requires the following (see CSS Text: Shaping Across Element Boundaries):
Tests & results:
Interactive test, A span with a colour change for one letter in an Arabic word doesn't break the joining behaviour
Gecko and Blink keep joins for styling that doesn't affect the shape of the characters (eg. text-decoration), and keeps it for colour changes, however Firefox fails for changes in font-weight, font-style, and font-size, as well as for markup such as em
and b
tags.
(Gecko and Blink also only pass some of the tests for non-zero margin/padding/border and bdi isolation. Which expect the cursive joins to be broken.)
Browser bug reports: Gecko • Blink • Webkit
Priority:
It would be useful to decide on the potential impact of the failures described here, so as to prioritise the issue. Is the inability to surround/style parts of a word a significant issue? It may be problematic when defining a term (using dfn
) if the term is only part of the run of letters between spaces, eg. after the definite article.
This issue is likely to apply to all cursive script text.
When opacity is applied to text, Gecko and Blink produce dark patches where the cursive glyphs overlap, but Webkit and Legacy Edge don't. See the test.
For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap.
This issue is likely to apply to all cursive script text, but also to other scripts that have joins between letters.
When text stroke effects are applied to cursive text, they should not interrupt the cursive flow.
Unfortunately, that's not the case for current implementations. Overlaps where the glyphs join produce double breaks in the cursive flow.This example shows the typical result for Arabic.
The set of modern languages using cursive scripts includes those that use the following scripts: Arabic, Syriac, Mongolian, Mandaic, N'Ko, Adlam, Hanifi Rohingya. It also affects text in archaic scripts, including Phags Pa, Manichaean, Psalter Pahlavi, Sogdian, Old Uyghur, Chorasmian.
However, this also affects scripts such as Devanagari (Hindi, Marathi, etc), Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Bengali, Gondi, Modi, Newa, etc. This example is Hindi:
In Gecko, Blink, and Webkit the stroke around the text interrupts the cursive flow.
The property text-stroke
is not yet in CSS, but has been implemented in major browsers under the name -webkit-text-stroke
.
-webkit-text-stroke
is currently specified in WhatWG's Compatibility spec.
Interactive test, Text stroke applied to Arabic text doesn't cut joining glyphs apart
tbdMarking as advanced because this is a decorative feature.
Does the browser support requirements for baseline alignment between mixed scripts and in general? See available information or check for currently needed data.
Does your script need special text transforms that are not supported? Does your script convert letters to uppercase, capitalised and lowercase alternatives according to your typographic needs? Do you need to to convert between half-width and full-width presentation forms? See available information or check for currently needed data.
No known problems in this area.
This is about how text is divided into graphemes, words, sentences, etc., and behaviour associated with that. Do Unicode grapheme clusters appropriately segment character units for your script? When you double- or triple-click on the text, is the expected range of characters highlighted? When you move through the text with the cursor, or backspace, etc. do you see the expected behaviour? (Some of the answers to these questions may be picker up in other sections, such as line-breaking, or initial-letter styling.) See available information or check for currently needed data.
No known problems in this area.
Are there specific problems related to punctuation or the interaction of the text with punctuation (for example separation of punctuation from previous text, but allowing no line break between)? Are there issues related to handling of abbreviation, ellipsis, or iteration? Are there problems related to bracketing information or demarcating things such as proper nouns, etc? See available information or check for currently needed data.
This is about ways of marking text (see also specific sections dedicated to quotations and inline notes/annotations). Is it possible to express emphasis or highlight content as expected? Bold, italic and under-/over-lines are not always appropriate, and some scripts have their own unique ways of doing things, that are not in the Western tradition at all. Text delimiters mark certain items or sections off from the main text, such as book names in Chinese, quotations, head markers in Tibetan, etc, and often involve the use of punctuation. Is there any behaviour that isn't well supported, such as overlines for numeric digits in Syriac? Are there issues about the positioning or use of underlines? Some aspects related to the drawing of lines alongside or through text involve local typographic considerations. Do underlines need to be broken in special ways for this script? Do you need support for additional line shapes or widths? Does the distance or position of the lines relative to the text need to vary in ways that are not achievable? Are lines correctly drawn relative to vertical text? See available information or check for currently needed data.
Are there any issues when dealing with quotations marks, especially when nested? Should block quotes be indented or handled specially? See available information or check for currently needed data.
Some scripts create emphasis or other effects by spacing out the words, letters or syllables in a word. Are there requirements for this script/language that are unsupported? (For justification related spacing, see below.) See available information or check for currently needed data.
The ruby spec currently specifies an initial subset of requirements for fine-tuning the typography of phonetic and semantic annotations of East Asian text, including furigana, pinyin and zhuyin fuhao systems. Is is adequate for what it sets out to do? What other controls will be needed in the future? What about other types of inline annotation, such as warichu? (For referent-type notes such as footnotes, see below.) See available information or check for currently needed data.
No known problems in this area.
If the script has its own set of number digits, are there any issues in how they are used? Does the script or language use special format patterns that are problematic (eg. 12,34,000 in India)? What about date/time formats and selection - and are non-Gregorian calendars needed? Do percent signs and other symbols associated with number work correctly, and do numbers need special decorations, (like in Ethiopic or Syriac)? How about the management of personal names, addresses, etc. in web pages: are there issues? See available information or check for currently needed data.
Does the browser capture the rules about the way text in your script wraps when it hits the end of a line? Does line-breaking wrap whole 'words' at a time, or characters, or something else (such as syllables in Tibetan and Javanese)? What characters should not appear at the end or start of a line, and what should be done to prevent that? See available information or check for currently needed data.
See also hyphenation below.
Is hyphenation used for your script, or something else? If hyphenation is used, does it work as expected? (Note, this is about line-end hyphenation when text is wrapped, rather than use of the hyphen and related characters as punctuation marks.) See available information or check for currently needed data.
When text in a paragraph needs to have flush lines down both sides, does it follow the rules for your script? Does the script need assistance to conform to a grid pattern? Does your script allow punctuation to hang outside the text box at the start or end of a line? Where adjustments are need to make a line flush, how is that done? Do you shrink/stretch space between words and/or letters? Are word baselines stretched, as in Arabic? What about paragraph indents, or the need for logical alignment keywords, such as start/end, rather than left/right? See available information or check for currently needed data.
The CSS Counter Styles specification describes a limited set of simple and complex styles for counters to be used in list numbering, chapter heading numbering, etc.The rules plus more counter styles (totalling around 120 for over 30 scripts) are listed in the document Ready-made Counter Styles. Do these cover your needs? Are the details correct? Are there other aspects related to counters and lists that need to be addressed? See available information or check for currently needed data.
Customisable counters are needed for many languages.
There is no way for users to create local counter styles that are not built in to the browser, and users also often want to tweak the counter style for particular contexts (esp. the prefix/suffix).
Arabic script text uses local counter styles. While some of these are supported by some browsers, the set of symbols used and their order varies by language.
For more details, see this GitHub issue, which is being used to track this gap. Please add any discussion there, and not to this issue.
Does the browser or ereader correctly handle special styling of the initial letter of a line or paragraph, such as for drop caps or similar? How about the size relationship between the large letter and the lines alongide? where does the large letter anchor relative to the lines alongside? is it normal to include initial quote marks in the large letter? is the large letter really a syllable? etc. Are all of these things working as expected? See available information or check for currently needed data.
How are the main text area and ancilliary areas positioned and defined? Are there any special requirements here, such as dimensions in characters for the Japanese kihon hanmen? The book cover for scripts that are read right-to-left scripts is on the right of the spine, rather than the left. Is that provided for? When content can flow vertically and to the left or right, how do you specify the location of objects, text, etc. relative to the flow? For example, keywords 'left' and 'right' are likely to need to be reversed for pages written in English and page written in Arabic. Do tables and grid layouts work as expected? How do columns work in vertical text? Can you mix block of vertical and horizontal text correctly? Does text scroll in the expected direction? Other topics that belong here include any local requirements for things such as printer marks, tables of contents and indexes. See available information or check for currently needed data.
Does your script have special requirements for footnotes, endnotes or other necessary annotations of this kind in the way needed for your culture? (There is a section above for purely inline annotations, such as ruby or warichu. This section is more about annotation systems that separate the reference marks and the content of the notes.) See available information or check for currently needed data.
Are vertical form controls well supported? In right-to-left scripts, is it possible to set the base direction for a form field? Is the scroll bar on the correct side? etc. See available information or check for currently needed data.
Sometimes a script or language does things that are not common outside of its sphere of influence. This is a loose bag of additional items that weren't previously mentioned. This section may also be relevant for observations related to locale formats (such as number, date, currency, format support).
There are many other CSS modules which may need review for script-specific requirements, not to mention the SVG, HTML, Speech, MathML and other specifications. What else is likely to cause problems for worldwide deployment of the Web, and what requirements need to be addressed to make the Web function well locally?