Comments on "Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML"

I have today with interest read the article Additional Requirements for Bidi
in HTML, and I was very pleased with the suggested changes.

Here is an suplemantary idea that I did not see mentioned:

The idea is basically to exclude a section from being used to for
determining the base direction. E.g.:

MOSHE: yes

which in a conversation should be rendered:

EHSOM: yes

But:

MOSHE: KN

should be rendered:

NK :MOSHE

This can be achieved by wrapping "MOSHE:" in a tag that indicate that it's
context is not to be used for either of the two mentioned auto bidi
determination algorithms. The syntax for this tag needs to be determined of
course.

The spec also suggests something that Amit Aronovitch has been saying for
years, and to which I have been hesitant but am now convinced, namely that
gtk should have a way for the user to explicitely set the text entry
basedirection. Perhaps I'll implement this if I get too much free time on my
hands in the near future. There are some remarks in the text that are
applicable for such an implementation, like the fact that the implementation
should be using the typical system interaction for such a change.

Another issue that is not dealt with, which is probably ok, is how the
underlying system allows bidi interaction. Are selections logical or visual?
How is the cursor moved? How do you enter a new embedding level? How does
the cursor change according to language.  The advantage of having this
specified in HTML spec would be better consistancy. On the other hand, this
is already too far removed from the concept of a "markup language"?

Regards,
Dov