>This is because the directionality codes are not *characters* in the
>true sense of the word, but rather codes used to switch functionality
>from one mode to another. As scuh, they deserve the role of markup.
>
>In the I18N draft group, we discussed whether they should be markup,
>or codes, and decided on markup, because they are not really
>characters.
For the record, I concur with Jony Rosenne's analysis of this
issue. HTML support for the Unicode Standard should be for ALL of it.
It is not meaningful to try to pick out the bidi formatting characters
(or any other formatting subset, for that matter) and create ad hoc new
markup for them which differs from the text behavior specified
in the Unicode Standard.
Do you pick 0xA0 NO-BREAK SPACE out of ISO 8859-1 because it is
not a "*character* in the true sense of the word" and has
formatting implications for an implementation of ISO 8859-1 encoded
text?
Many encoded entities, graphic or otherwise, which make their
way into character encoding standards, engender disagreement
about their appropriateness for encoding as characters. However,
once they are in the standards, implementations of the standards
must treat them as such.
--Ken Whistler
Technical Director, Unicode, Inc.
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