Mixing scripts (Re: Unicode versions (Re: Criteria forexceptional characters))

Cary Karp ck at nic.museum
Sun Dec 24 11:49:38 CET 2006


Quoting Martin:

> the spoofing potential between Ascii and Arabic or Hebrew is very low
> (make sure to use a font that lets the user distinguish Arabic Alif
> and l/I/1, though). However, mixing Ascii and Arabic or Hebrew is
> disallowed both in IDNs and in IRIs to avoid bidi problems.

There are widely used fonts in which the U+0627 ARABIC LETTER ALEF, the
U+05D5 HEBREW LETTER VAV, and the U+05DF HEBREW LETTER FINAL NUN all
appear as vertical lines (and where the U+05E1 HEBREW LETTER SAMEKH is a
small circle easily confusable with a U+006F LATIN SMALL LETTER O). It's
hard to tell from the way Martin's comment is punctuated if he is only
commenting on the negative effect of mixing ASCII with either Arabic or
Hebrew. No matter, though -- Arabic and Hebrew can be mixed in a single
label. Since all it takes is a single look-alike pair of frequently used
 characters to do sneaky things, there may be justified concern about
confusion that can be caused by Arabic-Hebrew substitution.

/Cary


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