Digit restriction (Re: Comments on bidi-04)

Harald Tveit Alvestrand harald at alvestrand.no
Tue Mar 18 19:59:33 CET 2008


John C Klensin skrev:
> --On Tuesday, 11 March, 2008 08:57 -0400 Harald Tveit Alvestrand
> <harald at alvestrand.no> wrote:
>
>   
>> For instance, the string AN EN, when embedded between 2 dots,
>> will behave as follows in a LTR context:
>>
>> <RLE><PDF>.<AN><EN>.<RLE><PDF> reorders into <AN><EN>.. (that
>> is, both dots jump to the right end of the string). (I hope
>> you agree with me that "sor" and "eor" will both be "R" for
>> the run that goes .<AN><EN>., while the embedding direction is
>> L).
>>
>> This affects 3 of the 53 length-2 combinations allowed by
>> IDNA2003, and 43 of the 375 length-3 combinations allowed by
>> IDNA2003.
>>
>> But - ALL of the strings affected turn out to be eliminated by
>> our currently proposed set of selection criteria. If a string
>> passes the test for "safe BIDI label" in bidi-04, it will not
>> be affected by bidi formatting codes in the text around it.
>>
>> So we can eliminate the restriction.
>>     
>
> Well, some of us still believe that the "safe BIDI label" test
> is too safe.    Certainly it is sufficient, but I'm not sure
> that the restrictions it implies --especially the trailing digit
> restriction-- is going to be acceptable in actual use.
Note: There's a leading digit restriction ("first", not "left", in the 
terminoligy used in the -bidi draft), not a trailing digit restriction. 
The draft says that one could impose either a leading digit restriction 
or a trailing digit restriction, but that there's no need for both - and 
then goes for the leading digit restriction.

If we go all-out for rules that involve adjoining strings, we can allow 
leading digits as long as we impose a context-specific rule that you 
shouldn't let the RTL-character-containing label at the next level have 
a trailing digit. (I think - without having run the test scripts).

But I agree fully with Pete's mode of attack here: If we want to allow 
things that don't satisfy the constraint as stated, we first have to 
restate the constraint, and figure out which strings can be made to 
satisfy it.

                    Harald



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