On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
> I am not sure what you mean, but it sounds very similar to what you wanted
> to avoid.
That was a preface, for the next idea that you've somehow agreed to...
> Condition (a) clearly doesn't apply to applications whose purpose *is* to
> change the text such as editors, word processors, etc.
My point was about changing a line the user doesn't edit. The problem I
was thinking about, was if we should normalize (in our own terms: bidi,
arabic joining, ...) the lines that the user has not touched. I think we
should not, or we will become non-conformant.
> But I don't se how interpreting something according to the rules can
> possibly be against the rules.
The rules are contradictory. We better not play with things we are not
asked to play with, which is different with not playing with things we're
asked not to play with.
> Of course, if the rules change, the program will not be conformant to the
> *new* rules -- but still conformant to the *old* ones that it was designed
> for. (Sort of a Japanese soldier abandoned in a desert island that doesn't
> know that the war is over :-)
A good point: many developers are just like that Japanese, they'll not
hear the news soon enough. It will be interesting to know that just a
months ago, I saw an article in the latest volume of a Persian computer
magazine which is the only one I buy personally. It was titled something
like "A purposal for adding Persian characters to Unicode". Apart from
their idea of requesting a separate block for Persian, the reference was
great: The Unicode Standard, Version 1.0, 1991.
Others may have long release cycles, and it will take two years for a
small bug to get fixed in their program. (Sorry, but I'm really annoyed
with Farsi Yeh bug in fonts distributed with IE 5 and Windows 2000, which
I reported on April 1999, and only needed changing two table cells, but
it's not fixed yet.)
> It basically says that that, *if* an application chooses to support
> bidirectional text *or* bidi embedding levels, it shall *either* present the
> text "*as* if it the bidirectional algorithm had been applied", *or* use a
> "higher-level protocol".
Let's hope that higher-level protocols don't become: "You can display the
thing in any way you like to. Don't bother, bidi people are familiar with
these issues!" ;)
--roozbeh
