Without bidi isolates or any other form of intervention the email address مارك@رسيل.السعودية wholly displays L⬅︎R I have just created a temporary page to show how the arabic address مارك@رسيل.السعودية appears in L➡︎R Context & L⬅︎R Context using bidi isolates. https://co-project.lboro.ac.uk/users/coas/arabic-email.html With reference to my page : The L➡︎R Context gives an email address in a structure more familiar to a L➡︎R reader. The structure being, in this case, local-part@label.label. It does not matter which direction a label text is. Each label could have a different direction and again it would not matter. A L➡︎R reader would readily recognise this as an email address. Personally I find it much easier to recognise an email address when written like this. Similarly for the L⬅︎R Context I have used html to illustrate. In a word processing document one would use the Unicode isolates U+2066➡︎2069. It would be the responsibility of the software to automatically implement/insert/apply the bidi isolation for display of the email address to users. There are indeed other cases but I think the same principles outlined above can be applied. André Schappo
On 8 Mar 2016, at 18:51, Andrew Sullivan <ajs@anvilwalrusden.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 08, 2016 at 06:02:12PM +0000, Andre Schappo wrote:
I have given some thought to how to handle/display domain names that are in a right to left script such as Arabic. After some thought and experimentation I think that each label of a domain name should be bidi isolated.
That's already the requirement for processing, according to IDNA2008 (that is, IDNA is label by label, not over the domain name). So so far, I agree.
I don't have an intuition as to what would be clear to a user; perhaps you have one.
But …
Lets take a 2 level domain name: 2ndLevelD.TLD where each label is written in a Right to Left Script.
… I'm slightly worried about this, because I suspect you're also going to need something that is unsurprising where the different labels are in different directions.
I believe that using bidi isolates leads to easier to comprehend domain names/email addresses for both Left to Right readers and Right to Left readers.
This is also probably true, but since an awful lot of cases don't include the markup to indicate the bidi isolates, there's still that problem too. This includes (just for instance) email, particularly the headers. So while the mark up helps I'm wondering what to do about other cases.
Best regards,
A
-- Andrew Sullivan ajs@anvilwalrusden.com
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