Re: [bidi] Re: BIDI?

I think that such a variety of opinions also means that there is probably
room for shaping the expectations, and not necessarily leaving it up to
configuration (which, experience teaches us, 99% of users never know exists
anyway).

More importantly, we are not talking about speccing what one product is
going to do in one place. Mark's intention is that gradually, hundreds of
applications - various browsers, email readers, word processors, text
editors, operating systems, spreadsheet applications, etc. will adopt it. Is
the user to configure each one of them installed on a given machine to the
same settings separately?

I think that the standard should be complete without relying on user
preferences.

Aharon

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 8:36 PM, Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>wrote:

>   Ø  I agree with Mati that seeing "com.google.docs//:http" instead of "
> http://docs.google.com" in an RTL context is no good, and I agree with
> Mohamed that the best results would be to set the IRI's base level according
> to direction of the characters used in the domain.
>
> We’ve actually received feedback from BIDI speakers that
> com.google.docs//:http (or com.microsoft.www//:http) is actually preferred
> by some users.
>
> We’ve also had some feedback (from different governments) that
> http://RTL1.RTL2.RTL3 would sometimes be the preferred form.  (where RTL
> is supposed to represent a RTL field/label)
>
> The actual preferences seem to be dependent partially on the user’s culture
> and partially on other life experiences.  (Eg: computer scientists are less
> likely to prefer the right to left ordering).  Other user correlations
> similar to Hebrew and Arabic mathematical preferences seem to exist.
>
> So, we’ve been leaning toward the following thinking:
>
> * always order the labels/fields either from left to right or right to
> left.
> * pick the initial direction from the user environment (eg: English gets
> left to right fields, Arabic gets right to left fields).
> * allow the user to override the direction in their preferences.
>
> We haven’t thought as much about IRIs within a document, we’ve been
> thinking that if we need to understand user expectations for the address bar
> first.  However, I think in that case of IRIs within a document, the primary
> language of the document count as the “user environment”.
>
> Note that we aren’t really giving any weight to existing behavior and were
> trying to understand user expectations from a clean slate because it’s
> trivial to get IE’s address bar, or other apps, to do obviously-wrong things
> (like put http in the visual middle of the string!)
>
> Anyway, that kind of seems consistent with Mark’s document The actual
> preference of which direction the labels are arranged seem to be dependent
> partially on the user’s culture and partially on other experience.  (Eg:
> computer scientists are less likely to prefer that form).  Other
> correlations similar to Hebrew and Arabic mathematical preferences seem to
> exist.  Note that lots of the discussion has been around the “address bar”
> experience, and less about IRIs embedded in random text.
>
> -Shawn
>
>
>