Mixing of AN and EN (Re: Protocol-08 (and status of Defs-04 andRationale-06))

[Martin Duerst]

At 04:45 08/12/16, Harald Alvestrand wrote:
>Alireza Saleh wrote:
>> Hi Erik,
>>
>>
>> The latest news we received in this case is that Mark is going to look
>> at it and will write a proposal and send it for public view. There is no
>> exact time for that yet.
>> Correction of this bug may not affect the -bidi rules directly, but it
>> is related to the display of  L AN characters in a paragraph. However 
>> this
>> effort may continue by UTC and application-providers to improve the
>> display of AN and AL characters. When I look at the recent 
>> improvements of
>> displaying AN,AL,R characters, I believe there will be no visual 
>> confusion
>> when you have AN,AL,R characters in a LTR contexts such as domains. 
>What is your reason to believe that domains are an LTR context?
>
>The idea that domain names may occur in free text has been a basic 
>assumption behind the bidi work. If they didn't, the document would be a 
>lot shorter.

There is no assumption of LTR context for domain names. However,
the IRI spec REQUIRES the equivalent of LTR context for IRIs.
The MUST is probably too strong, because it's very difficult to
guarantee in practice, but if you don't have that, there's no
guarantee that an IRI containing components with LTR characters
and components with RTL characters displays consistently.

Regards,    Martin.



#-#-#  Martin J. Du"rst, Assoc. Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University
#-#-#  http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp       mailto:duerst at it.aoyama.ac.jp