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.
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.
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.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)