Brion Vibber wrote:
William Allen Simpson wrote:
We covered these issues in great detail in the IETF over a decade ago. There was a lot of acrimonious argument then, too, but Hank (and others) did a great job drafting a technical solution that solved the transmission and editing problems.
(1) A canonical form for storage and transmission. In SMTP, all storage and transmission is LTR. I don't see why that couldn't apply here, too. Sure, it makes Hebrew appear backward in storage, but we usually don't look at the stored version.
(2) Display and edit as RTL. In practice, this turned out to be fairly simple by thinking about such things as opening and closing parentheses, rather than left and right. They simply are reversed on display.
(3) This allows all email to be parsed consistently, without change to the existing mail transmission programs, while specialized mail user agents (MUA) handle display of the text body.
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.
Yes, that's good, a canonical form for storage.
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.
But not when editing. The edits are handled by specific MUA. Some expose the raw markup, others hide the markup and handle the conversions.
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.
I'm sorry, perhaps I'm not sufficiently clear. The final output of text pages should always be handled in the standard canonical manner.
It's the edits that seem to be the problem. The edit box is defined and filled and processed by Wiki software. That is, this software is providing the UI. So, I was proposing that the Wiki software do the flipping into the edit box, then reversing and preprocessing from the edit box back into the canonical format.
That is, folks seem to have a problem with treating the edit box the same as a raw text editor. I was using the parallel that user freindly email editors don't treat the text as "raw", instead they handle the user edit processing and conversion from/to the canonical format.
Likewise, the difference in editing pages with Mozilla as opposed to the raw HTML with BareBone's BBEdit (my personal preference). Most folks seem to like the former.
Still clear as mud?