RE: BIDI : tackling the delimiter weirdness


> First, I agree with you that that's what I also would expect.
I was checking with bidi speakers :)

> But given:
> a) the constraints that Mark has mentioned, and

I agree that consistency is very important, which is why I think it needs to be clearly defined.  If IE does it one way and FF a different way, then users will get confused.
It'd be nice if this could be part of the IRI RFC, but it could live somewhere else I suppose.  I don't agree that consistency == Unicode Bidi algorithm, because even that isn't consistently applied.

> 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

That's why I think we need real usability testing, rather than a bunch of us Engineers trying to 2nd guess the expectations of a typical user :)

-Shawn

Received on Thursday, 28 January 2010 19:44:45 UTC