Makes sense to me; I like mentioning the major-use writing system to make the point, but it also makes it clear that it is broader than a single case.
--Rich
From:
<ua-discuss-bounces@icann.org> on behalf of Andrew Sullivan <ajs@anvilwalrusden.com>
Date: Wednesday, August 9, 2017 at 3:19 PM
To: "ua-discuss@icann.org" <ua-discuss@icann.org>
Subject: Re: [UA-discuss] Programming Language Hacks - UA103
On Wed, Aug 09, 2017 at 04:13:35PM +0000, Mark Svancarek via UA-discuss wrote:
Actually, we recently discovered an Edge bug (via the browser review) where the order of labels in a RTL.RTL.ASCII domain name were transposed during rendering. So I like calling it out explicitly.
This has been a regularly-recurring bug in various rendering engines
since at least 2008, because I recall the demonstrations of it during
the idnabis WG, and then seeing it in a completely different context
during the VIP work for ICANN in 2011 or '12. It's not always only
Arabic: at least one of the examples was reproducible in any bidi
context. I seem to recall one example where the wire order
[firstlabel]RTL[secondlabel]RTL[thirdlabel]LTR[fourthlabel]NULL
got rendered as
RTL.LTR.RTL
Which I thought was a pretty cool bug. I have no idea how it happened
that way, though I recall walking mysef through the bidi algorithm at
the time and figuring out what the problem must have been. Bidi is
hard.
I therefore think it wise not to call out Arabic especially -- but
maybe point out that Arabic is perhaps the most prominent writing
system that uses RTL, so that programmers aren't tempted to dismiss
the problem as a "corner case". Big corner, the Arabic-using
population!
Best regards,
A
--
Andrew Sullivan