- From: Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>
- Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2010 17:12:57 +0000
- To: Slim Amamou <slim@alixsys.com>, Larry Masinter <LMM@acm.org>
- CC: "public-iri@w3.org" <public-iri@w3.org>, Peter Constable <petercon@microsoft.com>, " (unicode@unicode.org)" <unicode@unicode.org>
> An IRI is a sequence of Unicode characters. Is there not > already a well-defined way of converting a sequence of > Unicode characters to a visual display? The problem (from my perspective at least) is that the Unicode BIDI rules are somewhat "generic". Unicode expects things like / and . to be used in a context of same-script stuff, like a date, time or number. IRIs use them as delimiters for a list of elements (labels in the domain name or folders in the path), in a hierarchical form. The Unicode BIDI algorithm doesn't recognize that there's an underlying hierarchy, so it can end up "swapping" pieces in that hierarchy in some cases. I'm not sure UTR#36 is the proper place to clarify display of such ordered lists. Proper BIDI rendering of IRIs isn't just a security, but also a usability, problem. It does seem like perhaps this concept should be mentioned in Unicode somewhere. (IRIs aren't the only place that similar ordered lists happen). -Shawn
Received on Wednesday, 3 March 2010 17:13:49 UTC