Brion Vibber wrote:
Well, we work in a Unicode/XML/HTML context, and for better or for worse the W3C world has explicitly embraced bidirectional text stored in logical order.
Parsing of markup happens on text in logical order. Since the markup is very much embedded in the text and requires both exposure to human editors and consistent parsing by the machine, I'm not sure that e-mail is a good comparison. The 'markup' in e-mail is invisible to the user: headers, escape codes, MIME content part separators.
As a followup, a little searching found: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/dirlang.html
Amazingly, this references Hank's work on email mentioned earlier: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/references.html#ref-RFC1555 http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/references.html#ref-RFC1556
Our output is to HTML, and editing is done in a web browser. This is a heavily bidi-centric environment which I don't think we could really override if we wanted to.