r12a
commented
4 years ago The first comment in this issue contains text that will automatically appear in the Tamil gap-analysis document as a subsection with the same title as this issue. Any edits made to that comment will be immediately available in the document. Proposals for changes or discussion of the content can be made in comments below this point.
To select the characters to which styling is applied, it is possible to manually mark up the initial letters and apply styling to them. However, it is more flexible and easier to use the CSS ::first-letter pseudo-element.
Test ::first-letter selection will keep conjuncts together.
The tests show that Firefox, Chrome, and Safari all handle consonant plus pulli, and consonant plus vowel-sign combinations correctly, include prescript vowel-signs. They also handle typical punctuation that occurs at the beginning of a Tamil paragraph.
Chrome and Safari, however, fail to treat as a unit the KSHA conjunct (although it's not clear that any Tamil words begin with that sequence of characters) and SHRI conjuncts, whether the latter is spelled with ஸ or ஶ. The latter conjunct does begin a few words, such as ஶ்ரீநகர். Firefox selects the whole conjunct in all cases.
The impact here is advanced, since the impact of the failures cited here on the user is likely to be very small, especially since they can resort to markup in the rare cases where the conjuncts are not properly handled.