Re: About section 8.2.4

Martin, thanks for your follow-up.

"Martin J. Duerst" <duerst@w3.org> wrote:

> > I still have two questions.
> > 
> > (1) Are there many language that can be encoded by "-e" encoding or
> >     only Hebrew and Arabic have "-e" (and "-i") encoding ?
> 
> There are many languages that use the Hebrew or Arabic script and
> therefore need Bidi support. There are also some more scripts (mostly
> historic) that are written right-to-left. In practice, only Hebrew
> email uses both visual and implicit ordering. RFC 1556 was written
> by somebody mostly familliar with Hebrew, but not so much with
> Arabic. While Hebrew and Arabic have more or less the same problems
> for Bidi, Arabic needs more work for character->glyph processing.
> In actual practice and early implementations, Hebrew therefore mostly
> was based on simple ASCII software, with some keyboard hacking and
> a different font. This resulted in using visual ordering in the
> data. On the other hand, for Arabic, a more sophisticated renderer
> was needed anyway, so in most cases, Bidi was also built in. Therefore,
> visual ordering is not much used for Arabic, while it was and still
> is in use for Hebrew. In contrary to what RFC 1556 says, the "-e" and
> "-i" was only used for Hebrew, but never took on for Arabic. This is
> mentionned in the HTML 4.0 spec. As for the distinction between "-i"
> and "-e", please see my previous mail. As far as I know, there are
> some standards that allow explicit reordering combined with 8859-8,
> but they never really came into much use, and are not relevant in
> connection with HTML 4.0.

And just FYI: in the list of registered charset values[1],
"ISO_8859-6-E" and "ISO_8859-8-E" are only encodings which use
explicit directionality ("EBCDIC-JP-E" is not for bi-directional
data, I believe ;-).

> > (2) Now my understanding about section 8.2.4 with your help:
> >     Section 8.2.4 says "we can use NO '-e' encodings to express
> >     explicit directional control, because HTML uses the Unicode
> >     'inolicit' bidirectionality algorithm only".
> >     Is it right?
> 
> No, this is not right, as explained in my previous mail.

Yes, sorry for confusion.

> > > P.S.  If you have some difficulty in translating into Japanese, maybe
> > > 	I can help you.
> > 
> > By the way, could I write to you in both English and Japanese (by
> > ISO-2022-JP) ?
> 
> No problem for me of Ishikawa-san. But maybe it is better not to send too
> many ISO-2022-JP mails to the translators list.

And for me, ISO-2022-JP-2 is also acceptable, if you need.


[1] <URL:ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/iana/assignments/character-sets>

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 1998 02:35:15 UTC