SGML - Combining characters separated by markup

Author

Combining characters separated by markup

Andreas Prilop

2005-05-30, 7:30 pm

In plain text, the letter "a" followed by combining mark U+0300
should be displayed as "à", letter "a" with grave accent.
Two or more Arabic letters in succession should join.

What should happen when such characters are separated by markup in,
say, text/html?

Here is a test page for Arabic letters:
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nh.../nastaliq.html6
Different programs display the last line "Arabic letters
separated by HTML markup" differently. Notably, Internet Explorer
ignores the markup and joins the letters (or combines base
letters with non-spacing marks).