RE: Please review: Strings and bidi

In the last paragraph you write: "this may be a Latin transcription of a non-Latin string"

I am not sure that I understand the problem. The language being Hebrew, which is generally written in a RTL script, we can guess that the required direction is RTL. If there are such Latin transcriptions within Hebrew-script text, they should be treated just like actual English, French or Greek phrases included within a generally Hebrew text.

There could be a problem if all the Hebrew content is written as Latin transcription. In this case, the "lang":"he" may do more harm than good. If this is your intended use case, it should be more explicit, and the word "string" does not convey the idea.

I suggest:
"this may be a Latin transcription (to be written left to right) of a unit of text in a language usually written with a RTL script, so that deriving the direction from the declared language does not indicate correctly how the Latin transcription should be written."
Note that I have written "unit of text" instead of "string". I am not sure this is the best term. Something more specific like "paragraph" might be preferred. 

Shalom (Regards),  Mati

-----Original Message-----
From: r12a [mailto:ishida@w3.org] 
Sent: Friday, August 18, 2017 12:52 PM
To: public-i18n-core@w3.org; public-i18n-arabic@w3.org; public-i18n-hebrew@w3.org
Subject: Re: Please review: Strings and bidi

On 31/07/2017 14:49, r12a wrote:
> Could you please take a quick look at this proposed new article.
> 
> To help with discussions about the problems of handling strings in 
> bidi environments i put together an illustration of the major 
> problems, hoping it will be fairly accessible to people who know 
> little about the bidi algorithm, etc.

I have added a third potential solution at the end, which uses language information to guess at direction.  Please take a look and send me any comments you have.

http://w3c.github.io/i18n-drafts/articles/strings-and-bidi/index.en.html#third

thanks,
ri

Received on Friday, 18 August 2017 14:35:13 UTC