Re: Updated article: Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm basics

thanks for the suggestions, Asmus. Getting a bit late here, so some 
quick answers below.

On 25/07/2016 20:41, Asmus Freytag (c) wrote:
> I think that an unstated goal of your text is to tell people "how to
> manage" bidi texts in a very high-level way.

Actually, teaching how to 'manage' bidi was deliberately not on my 
agenda for this article.  It was initially intended simply as an initial 
can-opener, to give newcomers a sufficient peek at the miniumum amount 
of most basic concepts involved in the UBA so that they could then 
understand the other articles we have that do get into the actual 
managing aspects (eg. the ones mentioned in the very last para). The 
latter are the ones we really need people to read if they are going to 
be working with bidi content.

By the addition of the final section i have today extended the purpose 
of the article so that i can also point to it for people developing 
linked data, csv, annotations, and other such markup-resistent formats 
and who have no clue (understandably) about why they should make it 
possible to identify the base direction for the strings they are passing 
around, and why the UBA isn't sufficient unto itself. (The key message 
is stated in the first para: "...it is necessary to use additional 
markup, metadata or special approaches to establish the correct base 
direction for a range of text").

> To that end, I would move the trailing exclamation mark example up into
> the discussion of base direction.

In fact, that example is indeed used higher up in the section at
http://w3c.github.io/i18n-drafts/articles/inline-bidi-markup/uba-basics.en#embeddedbd

> I would then change the "Beyond the algorithm..." section to "Isolating
> text passages" and make it explicitly about how isolation works by
> mentioning how to achieve it in HTML in the same general way you
> explained how to set base direction.

See above. I actually only added isolation as an afterthought. The main 
message of that section is that the UBA is not sufficient on its own. 
Isolation is just one aspect of that issue.

> After "numbers", I would have a (short) section on paired punctuation
> with an example or two. Handling pairs, and nested pairs, is now a
> function of the UBA.

That's at 
https://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/index#mirrored

> Finally, the very last paragraph points to other resources, it needs a
> header of its own, unless you want to make it part of "Further Reading".

Yes, that's probably a good idea. I'll look at it tomorrow.

ri

Received on Monday, 25 July 2016 20:09:58 UTC