IRI and bidi...

Hello bidi and core,

(IETF co-chair hat on, W3C chair hat off)

In a recent editorial meeting for IRIbis, I was charged with engaging the W3C bidi community regarding bidi in IRIs/URIs/Web addresses. There has been some discussion of this on the IRI list (public-iri@w3.org) [1] in the past. 

- There is an open issue [2] that suggests that IRI incorporate IDNAbis rules for a "component". 
- Some have suggested that presentation of IRIs to users might vary from the "normal" Unicode bidi rules.
- Some have suggested that "fully bidi" URIs might be necessary/possible, including right-to-left scheme names.

We need help from bidi experts in describing bidi processing and presentation.

So this note is basically to ask for your help in discussing and resolving different approaches to bidirectional text in IRIs.

Also, if one or more persons on this list would like to be the editor of a "bidi in IRI" Internet-Draft to be produced and advanced to RFC, ideally in the next three to six months. While currently bidi is handled inside the IRIbis document, if we had a separate editor we could split out that documentation and thus help it mature more quickly. IRI cannot be completed without the bidi component; having an additional editor focused on bidi in a separate draft may help us accelerate this work.

Please direct your comments and proposals to the public-iri@w3.org list. Please try to suggest modifications to the IRI draft text [3] or responses to open issues (such as [2]) in particular rather than bidi support ideas in general. If you wish to volunteer as an editor, please contact the IRI co-chairs (Marc Blanchet or myself).

(W3C chair hat on, IETF co-chair hat off)

I have added this to the Core WG's agenda for next week (29 September 2010).

Addison

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-iri/2010May/ 
[2] http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/iri/trac/ticket/25
[3] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-duerst-iri-bis-07 

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect (Lab126)
Chair (W3C I18N, IETF IRI WGs)

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.

Received on Thursday, 23 September 2010 18:49:42 UTC