Hello all, About two and a half years ago, I suggested adding a FAQ about the applicability of higher-level protocols for bidirectional plaintext, as specified by http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/ -- my suggestion was to clarify that higher-level protocols can only be applied upon agreement between all producers and consumers, and that such agreements effectively mean that the text is "special text" -- no longer plain.
In the time since then, I have been mostly removed from this issue, but I came back to it recently, to find that my suggested text was rejected, and instead, two FAQs were added to http://www.unicode.org/faq/bidi.html: The first, which is marked by the HTML anchor bidi7, goes with my understanding and defines a higher-level protocol as an agreement; but the second, marked as bidi8, goes the other way, and explains that actually, agreement is not necessary -- a program is at liberty to "implicitly define an overall directional context for display, and that implicit definition of direction is itself an example of application of a higher-level protocol for the purposes of the UBA". One result of this is the following scenario: I open my standard-compliant text editor, and write a line of text (to make things accessible to a wider audience, I use capitals for right-to-left English and small letters for normal, left-to-right English; note this sentence starts from the right): SESU RETHO DNA email ROF plaintext REFERP I I save this line in a text file. Then I display it using my standards-compliant text viewer, but now it looks like this: REFERP I plaintext ROF email SESU RETHO DNA And this is because my standard-compliant text-viewer chooses to apply its higher-level protocol and treat the line as a LTR paragraph. Since bidi8 is a little abstract on this point, and focuses on terminal windows rather than editors and viewers, I would like to ask: Does this concrete result represent the intents of the UTC? Thanks for your attention, Shai.
