On 2017/04/04 06:41, Stuart Stuple via UA-EAI wrote:
I believe for plain text with no fancy Unicode values, the rendering is well-defined because the period and ampersand are both neutral and assume directionality from the surrounding characters. See http://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/uba-basics.
Add Unicode directionality controls and you get a wide variety of orderings – but that’s as true of English as it is of Arabic. See https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2014/03/30/bidi-hyperlinks/.
When I last heard (several years ago), the Unicode consortium was still discussing whether to update the BiDi guidance to account for these cases.
"Hasn't decided on how" is definitely correct as far as I know, but "still discussing" is probably not, because I don't know of any ongoing discussion. It wouldn't be impossible to update the Unicode Bidi algorithm (which is a very clear algorithm, not just guidance) except for the fact that it's not clear how. Mail addresses, domain names, and IRIs (the version of URIs/URLs that contain non-ASCII characters) are somewhat difficult to identify in text. And then there are other artifacts that would need similar treatment, such as hash tags, the @somebody notation, and so on. And such notations keep coming up, and may also disappear. And there are cases where it's quite obvious to a human reader (assuming the reader can read Arabic or Hebrew or whatever other RTL script is in use) what the text says, but that's not necessarily easily put into a simple and straightforward (although already rather lengthy) algorithm. Regards, Martin.