Hi Richard, > The concept appears to exist in the form of the fields of the > fifth edition of ECMA-48. Have you digested this ambitious standard?
To be honest: No, I haven't. And I have no idea what those "fields" are. I spent (read: wasted) way too much time studying ECMA TR/53 to get to understand what it's talking about, to realize that the good parts were already obvious to me, and to be able to argue why I firmly believe that the bad parts are bad. Remember: These documents were created in 1991, that is, 28 years ago. (I'm emphasizing it because I did the math wrong for a long time, I though it was 18 years ago :-D.) Things have a changed a lot since then. As for the BiDi docs, I found that the current state of the art, current best practices, exisiting BiDi algorithm differ so much from ECMA's approach (which no one I'm aware of cared to implement for 28 years) that the standard is of pretty little use. Only a few good parts could be kept (but needed tiny corrections), and plenty of other things needed to be build up anew. This is the only reasonable way to move forward. If you designed a house 2 or 3 years ago, and finally have the money to get it built, you can reasonably start building it. If you designed a house 28 years ago and finally have the chance to build it (including the exact same heating technologies, electrical system etc.), you wouldn't, would you? I'm sure you looked at those plans, and started at the very least heavily updating them, or started to design a brand new one, perhaps somewhat based on your old ideas. I don't expect it to be any different with "fields" of ECMA-48. I'm not aware of any terminal emulator implementing anything like them, whatever they are. Probably there's a good reason for that. Whatever purpose they aimed to serve apparently wasn't important enough for such a long time. By now, if they're found important, they should probably be solved by some new design (or at the very least, just like I did with TR/53, the work should begin by evaluating that standard to see if it's still feasible). Instead of spending a huge amount of work on my BiDi proposal, I could have just said: "guys, let's go with ECMA for BiDi handling". The thing is, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have taken us anywhere. I don't expect it to be different with "fields" either. The starting point for my work was the current state of terminal emulators and the surrounding ecosystem, plus the current BiDi algorithm; not some ancient plan that was buried deep in some drawer for almost three decades. I hope this makes sense. That being said, I'd really, honestly love to see if someone evaluated ECMA's "fields" and created a feasibility study for current terminal emulators, similarly to how I did it with TR/53. cheers, egmont