On 7/16/2018 8:30 PM, Richard
Wordingham via Unicode wrote:
On Mon, 16 Jul 2018 10:53:03 +0300
Shai Berger via Unicode <unicode@unicode.org> wrote:
What I'm not OK with is:
!Hello, World
Which is what you'll see if your editor decides to use RTL
directionality for this file, as the FAQ says it may.
Using 'left aligned' for RTL and 'right aligned' for LTR are 'marked'
styles; they are not appropriate for uninterpreted plain text. Thus if
text is to displayed as left aligned, LTR defaults are appropriate.
With RTL default and right alignment, what looks like
!Hello, World
is much more acceptable for "Hello, World!".
An interesting ambiguity is "!True" v. "True!". "!True" can be read as
"Not true".
The solution may be to encourage the determination of the (default)
paragraph direction from the first paragraph for implementations with
only one margin. I am not sure if this behaviour is 'standard
compliant'.
The Unicode Standard uses the term "conformant".
Its conformance clause is written to allow implementations to solve
real-world issues
without becoming formally non-conformant.
Given that the Unicode Standard is intended to be applicable to all
applications and
all texts, a certain latitude is not only expected, it is essential.
In this case, the rules are clear, implementations may override the
paragraph direction
and there is no constraint as to how they arrive at their choice.
Ideally, there choice is documented, and users who want something
different would have
the choice of a setting (or an alternate implementation).
Likewise, plain text is generally not sufficient for all real and
imagined contents. At some
point you will run into special needs that require some amount of
"styling" information
to be sure the receiver can interpret it unambiguously.
(A mild form of that is the common device of using italics in
marking the stress for some
ambiguous sentences in English. A historic example would have have
been the alternation
between Fraktur font and Roman font for German texts containing
foreign words - there are
examples where you will loose some content if you cannot mark that
distinction).
I really like the way Ken put it, essentially, if you (as an author)
want to have control over
how the reader sees your text, then you need to agree on a
higher-level protocol. Normally,
that would mean styled text, in practice, but it could also be an
agreement on what text
editor to use (perhaps one with two margins ..)
A./
Received on Mon Jul 16 2018 - 23:51:23 CDT