RE: [bidi] Re: BIDI?

That seems to be the biggest factor (locale), though I’m hesitant to suggest it’s the only factor.

For example, an Arabic speaking coworker using an en-US box obviously has en-US locale preferences.  However they can change their IE address bar to “right to left reading order”.  Then you’re suddenly outside of the “locale” based assumptions.

Also, “locale” in some cases would be more appropriately the page than the user locale?  Eg: visiting an en-US web page may have a different behavior than an ar-EG web page?

-Shawn

From: Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin [mailto:aharon@google.com]
Sent: Wednesday, April 27, 2011 11:31 AM
To: Shawn Steele
Cc: Mohamed Mohie; Matitiahu Allouche; bidi@unicode.org; bidi-bounce@unicode.org; Mark Davis ☕; public-iri@w3.org
Subject: Re: [bidi] Re: BIDI?

So then we are talking about a locale property, not an (independent) user setting. I could buy that.

Aharon
On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 9:16 PM, Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com<mailto:Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>> wrote:

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

There seem to be clear differences in expectation, particularly between Hebrew and Arabic speakers.  It is possible to make a standard that is consistent and doesn’t vary.  However that standard might “look funny” to some users.  Worse, it seems that the preferences are biased by things like how much of a mathematician they are.  Probably all people going to http://www.zoo.org aren’t engineers/scientists, and that needs to be friendly to them.

I think this is similar to date or time formatting.  Yes, that’s “scary”, because we’re talking about an IRI after all, which is Important.  However if I get a check for $1.000, the distinction between . and , is also going to be important to me.

So an IRI advertising a musical on the side of a bus may be a little fuzzy to me if I don’t understand the culture.  However I need to know the culture to know whether to not bother typing in the IRI because 1/9/2011 has already passed, or to make reservations because that’d be a fun thing to do on my birthday.

-Shawn