Re: Neutral directional characters in Mozilla/ Firefox

[email protected] wrote:
> Mozilla or Firefox for Linux display the following HTML extract (with
> the capital letters indicating Arabic text):
> 
> <div dir="rtl">
> The date is:<br>
> 2006 YLUJ 17
> </div>
> 
> ... like this:
> 
> The date is:
> 2006 YLUJ 17
> 
> Yet, I understand from the litterature on bidirectional Unicode text
> that neutral directional characters (like the colon) surrounded by
> strong directional characters of different directions (in this case:
> the "s" and the "A") receive the same direction as the paragraph (in
> this case: right-to-left). So I would have expected the colon to appear
> at the other end of the line, like so:
> 
> :The date is
> 2006 YLUJ 17
> 
> Moz/FF behave as expected if the second line starts with some
> right-to-left text. For example:
> 
> <div dir="rtl">
> The date is:<br>
> 2006 YLUJ 17 YADNOM
> </div>
> 
> is displayed:
> :The date is
> 2006 YLUJ 17 YADNOM
> 
> 
> Do Moz/FF wrongly consider the digit at the beginning of the second
> line as a strong character, giving the colon the same (left-to-right)
> direction? Or am I missing something else?

See http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/#W7

In the first example the first strong character before the digit is 
left-to-right, so the digit is considered left-to-right.

> 
> Thanks
> 
> Patrick
>