RE: [iri] #121: BIDI: Some users are requiring right-to-left label ordering.

IE is currently not great now, getting into the mixed-up situations we all know is undesirable.

A "concrete example" seems hard, but one that I'm keen on is a partial web name on the side of a bus, in Arabic, eg: CCC.BBB.AAA.  Note that I'm intentionally leaving out the http:// and any default.html or whatever.  I have a difficult time imagining any Arabic speaker copying that onto a notepad other than by writing from right to left.  I also expect that they would then naturally type it the same way they wrote it.  I think we have to build from there, that's how 90% of the people use an IRI.  Nobody's going to type the http://, particularly in Arabic, because it requires a keyboard change, and the browser will add it for them.

In those 90% useful cases there is no mixed Latin/Arabic, it's just a domain name.  It's nice if we present mixed up stuff a little more orderly, but nobody cares about the part after the domain name.

I believe that we need to allow the same thing we have with LTR ordering, except for RTL.   Where it gets confusing to me is when you choose LTR or RTL behavior.  A few options seem possible:

* User Preference
* System/Application Preference (eg: I'm looking at an Arabic web site, so I'll show RTL labels.  I'm looking at an English web site, I'll show LTR labels).
* If there're any RTL characters, do the whole thing as RTL
* Restrict the RTL/LTR test to the primary part of the IRI, eg: domain.

Caveats are that many of those probably allow homographs in some cases (Maybe not User Preference, since they'd know it'd always be one direction or the other.)  I'm not worried about those cases as SmartScreen will easily filter those out if necessary.  It'd be harder if we didn't force RTL/LTR on the whole thing (eg: had current BIDI algorithm behavior).

-Shawn

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Masinter [mailto:masinter@adobe.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 28, 2012 3:31 PM
To: duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp; Shawn Steele; adil@diwan.com
Cc: public-iri@w3.org
Subject: RE: [iri] #121: BIDI: Some users are requiring right-to-left label ordering.

My read on the situation:

It would be helpful if we could get some agreed text describing the nature of the problem --  it sounds to me that there might be agreement on the problem (more or less) , just not on whether there are feasible (partial) solutions.

If we have agreement on the problem statement, then we can:

* document partial solutions (with caveats)
* say we don't believe there are any feasible solutions at this time

It would be useful also to get a survey of of what current implementations actually are doing now, along with some concrete examples of the nature of the problems.

> I really need an way, even optional if need be, of rendering for RT  
> before I can "sign off" on this draft :)

There's no magic, just "rough consensus and running code":

* if all of the implementations agree, then we can document that. 
* If  there are multiple implementations currently, we can try to pick one.
* if we don't like any of the implementations, we can say so.
* If there are no implementations or even demos or samples of implementations, we shouldn't hold our breath hoping one will appear. 

Larry
--
http://larry.masinter.net

Received on Wednesday, 28 March 2012 22:51:27 UTC