math in arabic -- w3c mathml group looking for contributions

Hello all.

I am posting (by permission) this message from Asmus Freytag of the
Unicode Technical Committee and W3C i18n group.

--Robert

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Dr. Robert Miner                                RobertM@dessci.com
W3C Math Interest Group Co-Chair                      651-223-2883
Design Science, Inc.   "How Science Communicates"   www.dessci.com
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------------- Original Message --------------
From: Asmus Freytag <asmusf@ix.netcom.com>
Subject: Re: math in arabic -- w3c mathml group looking for contributions

Robert,

as you see I posted your call for contributions on the Unicode bidi list. I
wouldn't mind getting involved with MathML - I'm currently an invited
expert on the W3C i18n group, that gives me some access to W3C resources -
let me know what I need to do to participate.

I suggest that once the MathML group has reviewable drafts, that we find a
way to solicit a formal review of the Unicode related aspects by UTC and
its bidi committee. But for that, one would need a draft.

While Unicode has no problem with higher level protocols marking text
segments as being explicitly RTL (overriding implicit directionality of the
characters), Unicode would have big problems with throwing out the bidi
algorithm entirely, or even making it optional, for text that is not so
marked up.

The latter would be clearly non-conformant.

I think it's important to make sure that whatever solutions MathML comes up
with can be conformantly implemented under Unicode. The suggestions by on
of the people in the message that bnb forwarded are clearly not conformant
(as stated). A clear statement of principle, that the rules for higher
level protocols as stated in http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/ will be
followed in the design, would be helpful, I think.

A./

Received on Thursday, 4 November 2004 21:13:48 UTC