- From: Martin J. Dürst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
- Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:04:43 +0900
- To: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
- CC: Matitiahu Allouche <matial@il.ibm.com>, Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>, www-international@w3.org
On 2009/08/26 11:03, John Cowan wrote: > Matitiahu Allouche scripsit: > >> I suggest to stick to a more classic definition of 'Visual', such as: >> 'Visual' refers to the practice of storing Hebrew characters in >> presentation order, so that there is no reliance on reordering performed >> by the operating system or the display subsystem. > > Except, what is "presentation order"? It can be rightward, leftward, > or upward nowadays. To speak of left to right order as "presentation > order" is to submit to a purely parochial viewpoint. > > I would go with "the practice of storing Hebrew characters in > left-to-right order on each line of text", combined with an explanation > that the term "visual" is a historical one rooted in the days when only > left-to-right reading was considered normal for computer text. I agree with your comments re. presentation order. But the word 'visual' is more than historical, and is justified by more than a simple 'parochial' LTR assumption. Visual contains explicit linebreaks, and does not use subruns that go the other way (for 'logical', such subruns are used at least for numbers, if not for embeddings). An immaginary "RTL visual" would have the same properties, and (except for special lucky cases) the same disadvantages (a pain to input, edit, vocalize,...). Regards, Martin. -- #-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University #-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp
Received on Wednesday, 26 August 2009 04:05:49 UTC