Re: Summary of bidi discussion with Social Web WG

I read the linked discussions... People all over the RTL world from Morocco
to Pakistan, struggle with RTL typing. Regular pIeople, not i18n nerds like
me. They are struggling even in much more traditional environments like
desktop word processors, not to mention massively multilingual websites. So
the fact that there are millions of them and they are used to something
doesn't mean much by itself, because whatever they are used to is likely
not very good.

On the other hand, any attempts to force people to explicitly set direction
are probably doomed to failure. It's something that would be comfortable
for me, but experience shows that most people have don't want to understand
explicit direction setting, and they just want to type letters. Optional
explicit direction setting is something that I'd, personally, appreciate
very much for edge cases when auto-detection doesn't work, but I could live
without it.

First-strong is not nearly enough, period. Especially in social networks
and chat apps, where strings very frequently begin with the name of a
person, and that name is very frequently written in Latin characters. Same
for brand names, etc.

Automatic detection works in chat mobile apps and social networks like
YouTube, Twitter and Facebook is not perfect, but usually it works
surprisingly well. But every app implements it separately. In general it
seems that it mostly works by counting characters or words. Making one of
these algorithms standard would be far better than standardizing
first-strong. It's unfortunate that first-strong was picked for HTML's
dir="auto", too.


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2016-08-03 14:42 GMT+03:00 <ishida@w3.org>:

> In preparation for the discussion tomorrow (Thursday) during the i18n
> telecon, here are the minutes of the discussion held yesterday (Tuesday)
> with the Social Web group.
>
> https://www.w3.org/2016/08/02-social-minutes.html#item07
>
> I wasn't invited to speak until 5 minutes before the end, and the
> discussion wasn't as productive as i hoped.  A lot of the feedback centred
> around dislike of the idea of using a separate direction property to set
> the default base direction (which actually i wasn't recommending, it was
> just one possibility on the table).  There was strong preference for
> first-strong detection coupled with Unicode control codes for problem cases
> for plain text strings (eg. name), and presumably first-strong detection
> for default paragraph direction when using markup (i guess in the absence
> of markup to the contrary, but that wasn't discussed).  Grounds for
> pushback mainly centred on the supposition that there are no APIs out there
> that do that.
>
> So a key question for Thursday is whether anyone sees any advantages in
> using a separate direction property.  Would first-strong detection coupled
> with control code/markup for tricky cases be sufficient?  To my mind, this
> may be ok for plain text, although there appears to be a problem that
> people can often not access the control codes (and when they can, not
> easily).  That may need fixes to keyboards, however, rather than to the
> model.
>
> For marked up text, i suspect that the spec needs to be a little more
> careful in the way it indicates how the default direction should be
> established for paragraphs.  If the paragraph starts with <p dir="rtl">
> then first-strong should be not used.
>
> Btw, i put together some tests for Twitter and Facebook that look at
> various problem situations and show the results.  See
>
> https://github.com/w3c/i18n-activity/wiki/Bidi-handling-in-Facebook-and-Twitter
>
> ri
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