Re: Directionality Standard

On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 04:42:11AM -0500,
 Behnam <[email protected]> wrote 
 a message of 67 lines which said:

> But RSS readers were displaying the content in ltr format  

If the RSS feed (you did not provide the URL, by the way) uses the
arabic script, then, indeed, these readers are wrong since arabic
characters in Unicode have the bidi class "Arabic_Letter" and should
be rendered RTL, without needing HTML or Atom attributes (I do not
think RSS has such an attribute.)

> http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2007/05/17/reading-feeds-in-right-to-left-order.aspx

IMHO, this page is wrong because it uses languages instead of
scripts. There are also technical mistakes for instance they say "The
language value must be in lowercase" while language tags are
case-insensitive.

> But I am puzzled why a directionality issue should be resolved by a
> language tag in the first place,

That's probably because *most* languages are written in only one
script (azeri, for instance, is an exception) and therefore have only
one directionality.

But, you're right and they're wrong, directionality is a property of
the script, not of the language.