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.