John Hudson wrote:
Mark E. Shoulson wrote:
Well, that's the difference under discussion. The "plain text" would seem to be either the qere or the ketiv (but not the combined "blended" form), since each of those is somewhat sensible.
Is there some place in the standard where it says text must be sensible?
No, but I meant "sensible" in the sense of according with the usual orthographic rules of the language. Stacking 97 different diacritical accents on a single character, for example, would be an abuse of Latin orthography and would not thus be "sensible." I would say that pointing one text with the vowels of another, without regard for discrepencies in character-count, constitutes an abuse of the Hebrew orthography, and shouldn't be considered "normal" usage that must be supported.
That said, I have nothing against using NBSP and various other tricks and winding up supporting this. Even the INVISIBLE LETTER might make sense in some settings (e.g. where you have something to be drawn in later but the diacritic is printed now, for some reason). Just that I don't considere qere/ketiv per se a very convincing argument in a plain-text domain.
~mark
