RE: BIDI?

I strongly think that the fields have to be arranged LTR or RTL.  You can't have the "flipping" that happens when content is mixed and allows changing direction because it becomes unreadable.  For some things even an expert would have to pause to figure it out.



However, if it's strongly RTL or RTL, worst case the whole thing appears "backwards".



It's pretty clear that there's a desire in non-latin communities to have non-Latin forms of http://.  Even for LTR scripts that's an issue since changing keyboard layouts is a nuisance.  Of course, most browsers add the http:// for you, so it's not strictly necessary.


-Shawn

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http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste


________________________________
From: public-iri-request@w3.org [public-iri-request@w3.org] on behalf of Adil Allawi [adil@diwan.com]
Sent: Saturday, June 11, 2011 4:14 PM
To: public-iri@w3.org
Subject: Re: BIDI?

I have thought for a while about the bidi requirements for IRIs.

Firstly, I agree with Mark's general proposal - to have a uniform ordering of fields in IRIs. I have done some experiments with making Arabic tweets order right to left and the process is very similar. Figure out the 'fields' of rtl parts (e.g. Arabic phrases) and ltr parts (e.g. urls, smilies, #tags) then make sure these order uniformly right-to-left by inserting rlm and lrm marks.

The big problem is that Bidi IRIs are already a reality and have been since ICANN allowed local language TLDs in 2009. So our ability to mange user expectations is limited by how Arabic IRIs behave now. Here is a good example from Qatar:

http://الاعلي-للاتصالات.قطر/ar/news-events/event


or using capitals to replace the Arabic words:

http://QATAR.TELECOMS-SUPREME/ar/news-events/event


The url is generally left-to-right except for the domain which is right-to-left. Arabic users now expect the domain part of an IRI to be ordered RTL if it is in Arabic.

There is a need to have two directions for IRIs. I would suggest that the ordering direction is controlled by the direction of the language of the TLD. So السعودية domains should always draw rtl, but .sa will draw ltr.


Secondly, The text editing interface for a Bidi IRI is a nightmare for an Arabic user. There is no consistent cursor or highlight behaviour across browsers. There is also no consistent user expectation - does the highlight extend visually or logically across the text? How would this be entered on a mobile phone with a numeric keypad?

If one inserts an English letter inside the RTL domain, the whole domain will flip in around the English letter. How would a user understand about how to correct this?

To get around these problems I would like to see a subset of IRIs that can be entirely ordered RTL. That would include the scheme and the path. Like so:

ويب://الاعلي-للاتصالات قطر/ع/الصفحة_الرئيسية

There would need to be Arabic translations of some (not all) scheme names (e.g. http and ftp). This would allow web developers to create IRIs that are easily typed, edited, moved between applications and transferred unambiguously from paper to computer and back again. This could be as part of a transitional phase either:
- these are the only type of RTL IRI allowed until a large number of clients support a UBA extension.
- this is a voluntary IRI restriction that can be recommended and validated independently.

Adil

On 27/04/2011 00:22, Mark Davis ☕ wrote:
Here are some rough thoughts on how we could handle bidi IRIs.

http://goo.gl/QwSoo


Feedback is welcome.

Mark

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 23:20, Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com<mailto:Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>> wrote:

I'm wondering what the current thinking around BIDI IRIs is?  A few things in draft-ietf-iri-3987bis-05 jump out at me.




-Shawn

 
http://blogs.msdn.com/shawnste