Re: Special ordering for BIDI URLs

Hello Slim,

On 2010/05/25 17:34, Slim Amamou wrote:
> On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 1:10 AM, Mark Davis ☕<mark@macchiato.com>  wrote:
>
>> (...)
>>
>> But we're not. The best way to solve the problem that I can think of can be
>> done right now. Any significant site that wants to support BIDI languages
>> should provide for the ability to have IRIs with *all *RTL characters:
>> host name, path, query, fragment.
>>
>
> This is undesirable because it will create isolated communities

That's indeed a problem to some extent if mix-and match across 
directionality boundaries would be forbidden. I personally think that 
forbidding is a bad idea. But I think that market forces will create 
pressure towards favoring all-RTL (or mostly-RTL) and all-LTR (or 
mostly-LTR) IRIs.

> and an
> internet that does not look the same depending on whether you are American
> or Moroccan.

I think that's much less of a problem. It's not whether you are American 
or Moroccan, it's whether you are looking at an RTL IRI or an LTR IRI. 
There's nothing inherently better with ordering the components from left 
to right or from right to left, and there's nothing "isolating" because 
it wouldn't take anybody more than a few seconds to get the idea that 
RTL-character IRIs run RTL, whereas LTR-character IRIs run the other way 
round. People are already heavily used to the fact that Arabic and 
Hebrew are RTL, anyway.

> This is maybe the case already now, but it should not be our
> aim. In a sense, this even breaks the principle of net neutrality.

In what sense exactly would this break net neutrality?


> For the record I proposed enforcing LTR directionality for URIs as a
> solution, and already proved that at least for the HOST part (IDN), and
> given the current specs, labels MUST be ordered LTR.

Could you give a pointer to that 'proof'?


> During the discussions I understood the difficulties of such a change which
> includes at the same time unicode, IDN and URI (we could say the whole
> internet). But I still don't see any other solution which is viable and
> consistent with internets principles.

I think Mark has explained the restrictions on a solution in quite some 
details, as I have earlier. Your proposals would be nice, but I don't 
see how we'll get there, except with some impossible magic.


Regards,    Martin.

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

Received on Tuesday, 25 May 2010 09:48:37 UTC