Re: URL internationalization!

Martin;

> > > 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"?
> 
> If you don't know that, I'm afraid you don't understand much
> about bidirectionality, or at least you live in a world with
> terminology completely different from what is commonly used.

I have no time to be bothered by those terminologies created
by someone who does not understand bidirectinality.

> To shortly explain that, assume that German would be
> written right to left and with upper-case characters.
> Then the following is logical order from left to right
> (sequence as you would read it):
> 
> 	She said: "GUTEN TAG." and turned away.
> 
> The following is visual order:
> 
> 	She said: ".GAT NETUG" and turned away.
> 
> For display, the only thing that we need is visual order
> (that's why it is called visual!).

No. Unless you know the line length of the display, it is
important to distinguish

	".GAT NETUG"

and

							.GAT NETUG

> to meet you and discuss these issues with you. It would be nice
> if you can send me (by fax or electronically) a copy of your
> paper, so that I can read it beforehand.

I will.

> > 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.
> 
> It is stateful only in a few cases,

It is whether we have state or not.

> namely when instead of
> only having one citation with different directionality as
> in my example above, you have two or more levels of embedding.

Wrong. See above examples.

> > > 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.
> 
> We don't have to do that. Defining that URLs are stored
> in logical order means that all programs that work for example
> to do calculations on relative URLs, to extract parts of URLs,
> and so on, will work the same way as before.

Wrong. Conversion between logical and visual order needs
push down automaton.

> The programs have
> to work with all 8 bits, of course. Please note that if we
> would use ISO-2022, major changes would be necessary to
> avoid that bytes identical to reserved characters are
> misinterpreted.

Huh? You are confusing the internal and external representations.

> Of course, everything also works if we
> limit ourselves to "canonical form". The only thing
> that will be different is that if the regular expression
> for "any character" (usually ".") is intended to be applied
> to actual characters and not just bytes, it has to be
> written differently, or has to be expanded on a lower
> level. But this applies to any multibyte encoding whatsoever.

That is, there is no point of insisting on UTF-8.

Anyway, URL can't be expanded beyond some character set with
soft hyphens or non-breaking spaces.

							Masataka Ohta