- From: Doron Shikmoni <P85025@VM.BIU.AC.IL>
- Date: Sun Jun 15 13:19:14 1997
- To: "Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>, David Rashty +972-2-6584848 <RASHTY@WWW4.HUJI.AC.IL>, Dani Ilan <standard@NetVision.net.il>, Stefan Fuchs <sf@bezeq.co.il>, Israel Ervin Gidali <gidali@vnet.ibm.com>, Nati Guedalia <natig@ncc.co.il>, Gil Mor <gilmor@microsoft.com>, Mati ALLOUCHE <matia@vnet.ibm.com>, Moshe Shalom <moshe_shalom@easx.co.il>, Yevgenia Palanker <pal@actcom.co.il>, Doron Shikmoni <P85025@VM.BIU.AC.IL>, Francois Yergeau <yergeau@alis.com>, Gavin Thomas Nicol <gtn@ebt.com>, Glenn Adams <glenn@spyglass.com>, www-html@w3.org, Khaled Sherif <sherifk@caivm1.vnet.ibm.com>, Jeff Rosenschein <jeffr@accentsoft.com>, Chris Wendt <christw@microsoft.com>, John McConnell <johnmcco@microsoft.com>, Yaniv Feinberg <yanivf@microsoft.com>, Erik van der Poel <erik@netscape.com>, Uri Postavsky <urip@rtlsoft.com>, Uzzi Ornan <ORNAN@cs.technion.ac.il>, Chris Lilley <Chris.Lilley@sophia.inria.fr>, "Mark H. David" <mhd@WORLD.STD.COM>, Edward Resnick <Edward.Resnick@Israel.Sun.COM>, ILAN Hebrew List <ilan-h@taunivm.tau.ac.il>, Jonathan Rosenne <rosenne@NetVision.net.il>
Martin J. Duerst writes: >I see. So there is indeed considerable effort going into making >some visually coded text appear correctly on old browsers. > >And texts marked up this way won't display nicely, or even readably, >on browsers conforming to RFC 2070 or Cougar (which included RFC 2070). > >So there always have to be two document versions, one visual for >old browsers, and one with real BIDI for new browsers. The distinction >between iso-8859-8 and iso-8859-8-X would then only have the effect >to help negotiating these versions; i.e. old browsers would send >Accept-Charset: iso-8859-8, and new browsers would send >Accept-Charset: iso-8859-8-X. > >Is this a workable model? It implies that servers store two versions. >Servers that don't want to store two versions can use visual order >and also use <BDO> in order to tell newer browsers to treat things >the way it is intended. If everything is tagged with <BDO>, the >difference between iso-8859-8 and iso-8859-8-X disappears. This (extremely well put) summation of the issue demonstrates the problematics of maintaining a "double standard" (excuse the pun). Current "install base" don't have BDO tags, and will probably not carry two versions for each page. Instead, we will see a split world realm. >> When you specify in the charset for Visual order, you command the browser >> to parse the text as English Text. this is an exception. > >This is not what RFC 2070 nor Cougar is doing. Overloading BIDI >semantics with "charset" parameter may have been necessary for >email, but we want to move away from it. And having to tell >developpers: Implement the full BIDI algorithm, but then please >also have a method for switching it off, depending on the "charset" >is not what will get a lot of work done in this area. Exactly. Actually, it was not even "necessary" for E-Mail; it was needed to get Hebrew E-Mail support out the door *quickly* (registration of another charset proved to be much faster than defining new MIME tags & values, at the time). Regards, Doron Shikmoni
Received on Sunday, 15 June 1997 13:19:14 UTC