RE: BIDI IRI Display (was spoofing and IRIs)

From: Shawn Steele (Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com)
Date: Wed Mar 03 2010 - 23:55:36 CST

  • Next message: Martin J. Dürst: "Re: BIDI IRI Display (was spoofing and IRIs)"

    The problem isn't an IRI in different contexts (a list of IRIs or not), the problem is that an IRI *IS* a list.

    http://www.microsoft.com/en/us/default.aspx is a lot like { www, microsoft, com, en, us, default.aspx }, so IRI's shouldn't mix up the parts, (eg: reversing en & us in the display would be misleading). In a BIDI context, this probably means that the elements of the list are ordered from right to left. The problem with the Unicode bidi algorithm is that if 2 LTR script elements are adjacent, they lose the ordering of the list.

    Users seem to expect that elements of an IRI are drawn as a list like I described. It has also been proposed that they just be rendered from LTR regardless of whether any labels are RTL or not, and another suggestion has been that users don't really understand the ordering of the IRI, so it's okay to reorder as long as it's consistent.

    I would like to see a usability study to figure out what the average BIDI user expects since us engineers may have biases that most people don't have. My informal observations and feedback from the BIDI community seems to support the "elements of a list" hypothesis, however I'd like that to be confirmed (or disproved) by a "real" usability study :)

    -Shawn

    ________________________________________
    From: Larry Masinter [masinter@gmail.com] on behalf of Larry Masinter [LMM@acm.org]
    Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 6:00 PM
    To: Shawn Steele; 'Slim Amamou'
    Cc: public-iri@w3.org; Peter Constable; unicode@unicode.org
    Subject: RE: BIDI IRI Display (was spoofing and IRIs)

    If the same Unicode string is used for an IRI in running text and for
    an IRI in a context where its use as a "ordered list", then it would
    seem like

    * the presentation of the IRI in different contexts is the same

    is more important than

    * the presentation of the IRI in known IRI contexts is optimal

    Do you agree? I don't see how you can have both.

    Larry 

    --
http://larry.masinter.net
-----Original Message-----
From: Shawn Steele [mailto:Shawn.Steele@microsoft.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 9:13 AM
To: Slim Amamou; Larry Masinter
Cc: public-iri@w3.org; Peter Constable; (unicode@unicode.org)
Subject: RE: BIDI IRI Display (was spoofing and IRIs)
> An IRI is a sequence of Unicode characters. Is there not
> already a well-defined way of converting a sequence of
> Unicode characters to a visual display?
The problem (from my perspective at least) is that the Unicode BIDI
rules are somewhat "generic".  Unicode expects things like / and . to
be used in a context of same-script stuff, like a date, time or
number.  IRIs use them as delimiters for a list of elements (labels in
the domain name or folders in the path), in a hierarchical form.  The
Unicode BIDI algorithm doesn't recognize that there's an underlying
hierarchy, so it can end up "swapping" pieces in that hierarchy in
some cases.
I'm not sure UTR#36 is the proper place to clarify display of such
ordered lists.  Proper BIDI rendering of IRIs isn't just a security,
but also a usability, problem.  It does seem like perhaps this concept
should be mentioned in Unicode somewhere.  (IRIs aren't the only place
that similar ordered lists happen).
-Shawn

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