- From: Larry Masinter <masinter@adobe.com>
- Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:25:43 +0000
- To: Shawn Steele <Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com>, David Singer <singer@apple.com>, "public-iri@w3.org" <public-iri@w3.org>
- CC: Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
>> It wouldn't hurt to improve guidance around Bidi IRIs.... We're trying to break them into labels and arrange each label in right to left (or left to right) order. (I'm using URL = IRI) I think there are two kinds of guidance: (1) Technical specifications for implementors (2) advice we might give ICANN and domain name registrars and registrants about requests for RTL in TLDs and inside domain names, and application developers hoping to use RTL components with their IRIs (URLs). Unless we have a critical mass of the implementors of popular IRI processors who are willing to resolve conflicts and make URLs work uniformly (Bidi only being one case), there's not much point in trying to do (1). The IRI working group closed because the implementors weren't playing. And, unless things have changed in the last several months, there's not much interest in fixing URLs to work consistently, even without RTL components. Each browser has its own hacks. Secondly, URLs are used in running text, where the text display will use whatever it uses for text display, and there's no opportunity to introduce anything else. And in this world, the natural way you'd put together a URL <method> : // <host> / <path> where <host> and <path> are allowed to be RTL In many cases, there's no way to modify software to both make the URLs look nice (as users expect) and be consistent with the Unicode standard. If there's no way to make it work everywhere, we should first advise registrars to be cautious about selling domain names which will cause the buyers problems when they go to deploy, namely, anything other than LTR. Larry -- http://larry.masinter.net
Received on Thursday, 29 October 2015 00:26:14 UTC