Re: URL internationalization!

On Tue, 25 Feb 1997, Masataka Ohta wrote:

> > There are some problems when directly applying
> > it to editing the same text with some markup, e.g. HTML or
> > LaTeX. For HTML, this has been discussed on the relevant list,
> 
> Finite-state bi-directionality, whose state can be encoded in
> stateless character code, is necessary at the plain text level
> and has nothing to do with HTML.

If you have a solution for this, which is more than just
"use visual order", I would appreciate a pointer to it.


> > And because an average URL
> > contains a lot of ASCII parts, it's probably better
> > if the components of an URL appear LTR (left-to-right) even
> > in otherwise fully RTL (right-to-left) contexts.
> 
> What a fair attitude.

I agree that it is not completely fair. And if URLs were
just something inside the computer, we could say that it
is a user interface issue, have everybody use his/her
preferred way of displaying it, and ignore it in this
discussion.

However, URLs are also written on paper. If user interface 1
uses convention X for bidi URLs, and user interface 2 uses
convention Y, and a user copies an URL from interface 1 and
types it into interface 2, a different URL will result.

This means that as soon as we allow URLs in native encoding
(which we don't yet as of my proposal) or better yet, as
soon as we risk to have URLs in native encoding (which we
have even without my proposal), we would better make sure
that we have an uniform way of displaying them.

Now it is clear that whatever way to display bidi URLs we
finally choose, in their internal representation and their
canonical representation (%HH), the sequence of the parts
of the generic syntax has to be in logical order if we
don't want all the existing software to be rewritten
beyond limits. As far as my above proposal goes, we
might even adopt visual order for the components between
the syntaxt characters, and would then have a completely
visually ordered URL.

But in order to be fair, as you request, we have to consider
other solutions. Many of them quickly come to my mind:

- Decide the global directionality by the directionality of
	the majority of components (not very good because
	then the directionality may change if you add a component).
- Use RTL directionality as soon as a single component/character
	is RTL (similar problems as above, but more predictable
	for the user).
- Invert sequences of RTL components (probably more or less
	what the Unicode algorithm does).
- Depend on the first character of the URL.

In all these cases, because logical sequence and visual
sequence is not the same, you will have to do some bidi
processing.

Probably Jonathan and others using mixed directionality every
day can tell us what they think may make sense, and what not.

Maybe we have to wait some more time to find the best
solution for this problem. But if we decide to have URLs
in full logical order, we can defer this decision until
we know more.


Regards,	Martin.