Re: Bidi issues

 > Arabic domain names, they always did it as MOC.BARA.BEW
 > (inverting not only each component of web.arab.com, but
 > also the order of the labels) rather than BEW.BARA.MOC
 > (just inverting the labels internally).

Just some very quick thoughs

But as I understand the bidi algorithm (and I don't really claim to
understand bidi, so please correct me if I'm wrong) although
WEB.ARAB.com will render sensibly in a RTL context:

com.BARA.BEW

It will render weirdly in a LTR context:

BARA.BEW.com (with the labels in the wrong order).

And the domain WEB.ARAB.foo.com won't render sensibly in either context

LTR: BARA.BEW.foo.com
RTL: foo.com.BARA.BEW

So you need something more than just the bidi algorithm to display
mixed LTR/RTL domains sensibly.  ie the UI needs to know to display
the labels in order from least significant to most significant (in the
users prefered writing direction).

It's easy to do this by getting the UI to insert suitable embedding
codes prior to rendering; I'm sure this was discussed on the IDN list,
but I haven't had time to refer back to it.

I'm not sure the same issues really occur with local parts, though,
since separators only have local significance.  There isn't really any
global 'right' order in which to display the segments of a local part,
since the very notion of segments is internal to IMAA.

	-roy

Received on Thursday, 7 August 2003 11:42:29 UTC