[Idna-arabicscript] Reasons for disallowing Arabic script digitmixing at the protocol level
Eric Brunner-Williams
brunner at nic-naa.net
Wed Mar 11 21:44:41 CET 2009
Ram,
There is no technical substance to your note. You can correct that, but
that's a wicked good reason not to send it to any IETF WG list, though
to be fair, lots of junk is sent to some lists, including the IDNAbis list.
I'm more interested in making sure that the scripts bit of the UTC is
well informed about characters adapted from Arabic, and either not yet
in Unicode, or usefully designated in the IDNAbis tables draft, than I
am in pushing an arbitrary, and rather vaguely argued partially correct
fix for what, to be honest, is yet-another-glitch in the UTC's work
product, the partial unification of Arabic Script, and the dangling
directional semantic difference between two sets of L2R digits in a
predominantly R2L script.
Ram, if you think I'm not a colleague you need only delete my address
from the mailing list. It is as simple as that. In fact, I think I'll
ask Aliraza or Dr. Shahshahni to delete my address from the list. I've
enjoyed some very smart and considerate exchanges from individual
members of the list, but the list itself is less useful to me than the
people on it, and in my opinion, it hasn't produced much since last Fall.
Because transparency is important I copied both lists on my original,
and I'm copying both lists on my reply. I'm deleting the portion that
contains your note, which you can send to the IDNAbis list or not, as
you please. Vint can always write "no squabbling", but silence would hid
the difference between two views, promoting one, and concealing the
other, which would not be useful no matter who held what view.
It seems to me there is a lot of work to be done, just on getting Arabic
right, from the Unicode bidi bug of treating "." as punctuation when it
is a label separator and should have no semantic value whatsoever, let
alone provide a vehicle for directionality to leak across label
boundaries, to typography, as Arabic isn't Latin done with a brush and
ruler, but is multi-level and could be slightly less ugly than at
present. Then there are the written languages which use some characters
from Arabic, in Arabized Africa, and Asia, and these are more useful,
and interesting, avenues of work than the one currently pursued to the
exclusion of all others.
The bottom line is that the IDNAbis WG would be ill-advised to hum in
favor of the "uniqueness and homogeneity of use of numerals" proposal as
a globally scoped policy implemented as a protocol. It may still, you
know how those things go, John was sold on the idea in Cairo, and
Everson "supports this proposal completely", though why he does so is
left to the reader's imagination, and I expect you'll sell your advocacy
position to the best of your abilities.
Eric
Ram Mohan wrote:
(some text deleted)
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