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

#121: BIDI: Some users are requiring right-to-left label ordering.


Comment (by duerst@…):

 (from Shawn)

 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

-- 
---------------------------+-----------------------------------------------
 Reporter:  shawnste@…     |       Owner:  draft-ietf-iri-bidi-guidelines@…
     Type:  defect         |      Status:  reopened
 Priority:  major          |   Milestone:
Component:  bidi-          |     Version:
  guidelines               |  Resolution:
 Severity:  -              |
 Keywords:  bidi           |
---------------------------+-----------------------------------------------

Ticket URL: <http://trac.tools.ietf.org/wg/iri/trac/ticket/121#comment:7>
iri <http://tools.ietf.org/wg/iri/>

Received on Thursday, 29 March 2012 07:53:51 UTC