Re: About section 8.2.4

At 20:26 98/01/27 +0900, Masayasu Ishikawa wrote:
> Hello UCHIDA-san,
> 
> uchida@happy.email.ne.jp (UCHIDA akira) wrote:
> 
> > I think that the word "not" in the last 4 words is NOT needed.
> > 
> > > Because HTML uses the Unicode bidirectionality algorithm, conforming
> > > documents encoded using ISO 8859-8 must be labeled as "ISO-8859-8-i".
> > > Explicit directional control is also possible with HTML, but cannot be
> > > expressed with ISO 8859-8, so "ISO-8859-8-e" should not be used.
> 
> No, the word "not" IS needed.  As noted in the previous paragraph of
> Section 8.2.4, "ISO-8859-8-i" denotes implicit bidirectionality, and
> "ISO-8859-8-e" denotes explicit directionality.
> 
> "Unicode bidirectionality algorithm" means implicit bidirectionality
> algorithm, thus, "ISO-8859-8-e" should NOT be used.

Hello Uchida-san,

Ishikawa-san is quite right that the text of the HTML 4 specification is
correct as it is. But his explanation is maybe not exactly right.
The Unicode bidirectionality algorithm contains both an implicit and an
explicit part. The implicit part is used when no BIDI control codes
or higher-level protocol giving explicit information is used.

Both BIDI control codes (strongly discouraged) and higher-level protocol
(DIR attribute) can be used in HTML, but they have nothing to do with
the 8859-8 encoding as such (they can as well be used together with
ASCII encoded HTML text, which also is not labeled as US-ASCII-E), so
this is the reason why iso-8859-8-e should NOT be used.

By the way, this was cross-checked with Hebrew experts during the
work on HTML 4.0, so I am quite confident it is correct.

If you have any other question, please feel free to ask (also in
Japanese if you want). Many thanks again for helping translating
HTML 4.0.


With kind regards,    Martin.

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 1998 01:31:43 UTC