Re: Bidir text and Unicode

Raise a github issue – and I’ll add my comments about the larger complexity of this item as it’s not just about bidi, it’s a much larger problem with international content in non-markup languages.

Leonard

From: Laurent Le Meur <laurent.lemeur@edrlab.org>
Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2017 at 8:27 AM
To: W3C Publishing Working Group <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Subject: Bidir text and Unicode
Resent-From: <public-publ-wg@w3.org>
Resent-Date: Tuesday, June 27, 2017 at 8:38 AM

A question was raised during the F2F meeting in NYC, about the proper internationalization of UTF-8 metadata values (eg. the book title).

I quote Ivan from the minutes: "On the i18n side, we will need to be careful about ids, uris, iris, etc. w/respect to i18n char-sets. Another area we need to be careful about is metadata, which also have issues with the char-sets for the actual text content. One example is mixing bidi text in the metadata content.",

Reading http://www.iamcal.com/understanding-bidirectional-text/<https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.iamcal.com%2Funderstanding-bidirectional-text%2F&data=02%7C01%7C%7C096452089bc94f0d4e8a08d4bd729d8c%7Cfa7b1b5a7b34438794aed2c178decee1%7C0%7C0%7C636341747344866058&sdata=mu862gOIuIlx1%2BsD1JHR%2B2juXy4k3z1hXvjsDl0kxbA%3D&reserved=0>, I see here a use of the HTML dir attribute, which will not be available natively in a JSON manifest; so we may have to create a JSON dir attribute representing document order. I also see the "implicit marker characters" (Left-to-Right Mark and Right-to-Left Mark) which help tailoring the direction of "neutral" characters. And the existence of "explicit markers" which describe a local text direction.

Therefore it appears that the only item we need to add to a JSON manifest to assure proper rendering of international text is a "document order" (a dir attribute that can be injected in the HTML rendering of the metadata values).

Any thought on this before I create a Github issue on the subject?

Laurent Le Meur