Protocol Action: 'Right-to-left scripts for IDNA' to Proposed Standard

[Slim Amamou]

On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 4:34 PM, John C Klensin <klensin at jck.com> wrote:
>(...) it is not at all clear to me that the correct behavior as
> perceived by someone who is used to looking at mostly-LTR
> strings in an RTL environment will be the same as that perceived
> by someone used to an RTL environment but not used to looking at
> those strings, much less the same as that perceived by someone
> used to an LTR environment only.  I think those are just special
> cases of the general issues Mark identified.

On this mailing list, there are native RTL readers, including me. And
we are here on purpose to sort out this kind of issues. That was
probably not the case in the 70s

> (...)  If we were to adopt and require some sort
> of unambiguous (for all protocol identifiers and all contexts)
> "beginning/end of IRI" and maybe "beginning/end of domain name
> outside URI/IRI contexts marker or other identification
> mechanism, then we could adopt a convention that would be
> absolutely consistent in both wire-order and presentation
> globally.

Why? Like Mr. Cerf said: this problem is unsolvable. Our problem is
simpler than that :  having a domain name (no matter how it was
identified as such), how could a person consistently identify it
(discriminate it from other domain names) and interpret it?

My opinion is :
- there should be no collision between domain names in RTL and LTR
contexts (In the current draft L1.R2.R3.L4 in LTR context and
L1.R3.R2.L4 in RTL context are displayed the same)
- the meaning (the structured aspect of domain names) should prevail.


-- 
Slim Amamou | سليم عمامو
http://alixsys.com