Re: URL internationalization!

> > > 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.

What do you mean "visual order"?

The only possible way to statelessly handle bidirectional text is
to encode directionality state into character codes.

The only reasonable way to do so is to use a single bit for left/right
directionality. The result is that English words are spelled backward
in the environment where line begins from right mergin.

   Masataka Ohta, "On Plain Text", Proceedings of International
   Symposium on Multilingual Information Processing, pp 65-67,
   March 1996.

should be helpful to you to understand what is the absolute
requirement.

But, it is not a matter, becasue regular expressions spelled backward
are still regular expressions and all the finite-stateness is preserved.

Anyway, you can't deny that ISO 10646/UNICODE is stateful.

> > 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.

That's why URLs must be ASCII only.

> 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.

Martin, we can't abandon finitestateness, regular expressions, grep,
sed, awk and all the tools for plain text processing, only because
high-level tools for mark-up languages allow for PDA grammers.

> 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.

Are you saying that we should be stateful?

> 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.

I already know the only possible solution.

And, ISO 10646/Unicode is no good.

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

Complexity of bidi processing in marked-up languages is
not a problem of finete-state processing of plain text.

						Masataka Ohta