Re: BIDI : tackling the delimiter weirdness

Hello Slim, others,

On 2010/01/28 13:48, Slim Amamou wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 12:44 AM, Shawn Steele
> <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>  wrote:
>> I'm not sure that solves the problem.  Specifically with these examples:
>>
>>    Logical representation: "http://ab.CDE.FGH/ij/kl/mn/op.html"
>>    Visual representation: "http://ab.HGF.EDC/ij/kl/mn/op.html"
>>
>> "real users" seem to get confused by the HGF.EDC behavior, and instead expect the data to have the hierarchy remain in a consistent direction, eg: http://ab.EDC.HGF/ij/kl/mn/op.html seems to be the expected behavior.
>
> That's exactly what I am saying. And that's the behaviour I am
> expecting. The "." in the host name component defines a relationship
> of the type : A.B.C means A belongs to domain B which in turn belongs
> to TLD C; and a RTL directionality (rightmost C is at the top level of
> the hierarchy) thus ab.EDC.HGF is the right visual representation.

First, I agree with you that that's what I also would expect.

But given:
a) the constraints that Mark has mentioned, and
b) the importance of an uniform display across a wide range of display 
opportunities (from special fields for IRIs to running text), for which 
you strongly agree,
it seems that it may be impossible to realize this expectation.

When Mati proposed the design currently in RFC 3987, he explained that 
the ab.EDC.HGF expectation may be much stronger for us technical guys 
than for the average person on the street. Such people, less familiar 
with the details of domain names and similar notations, may read the two 
words HGF and EDC as a phrase of two words in an otherwise ltr text, 
which would mean that they read the display string
    ab.HGF.EDC
in the order
    ab
    EDC
    HGF
which would be the correct sequence. Being in Japan, I have very little 
chance to do anything to check this claim, but it sounds at least 
reasonable. Assuming (maybe wrongly) that you are much closer to a lot 
of people, both technical and not so technical, who read and write bidi 
text daily, it would be great if you could try to find out to which 
extent the above theory works or not, independent of your personal 
preference (which, based on your technical expertise, I very much 
understand and share).

Regards,   Martin.


-- 
#-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp   mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp

Received on Thursday, 28 January 2010 10:33:59 UTC