Re: Need for Level Direction Mark

Hi.
From: Peter Edberg <pedberg_at_apple.com>
Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2011 00:22:33 -0700

> In the PRI 205 forum - http://www.unicode.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=33 - I have posted a draft summary of feedback on Level
> Direction Mark received to date originally on the PRI 205 page (http://www.unicode.org/review/pri205/, this feedback moved to the forum)
> and subsequently in this discussion thread. I have also posted a complete compilation of all of those discussions, as well as a summary of
> discussion on AL MARK.

> If you have feedback on the summaries, please post it to the forum (as concisely as possible) before Monday Oct 24, 2:00 PM
> California time (Pacific Daylight TIme, UTC-0700). At that time I will update the summaries as necessary, and then later that day post
> them as accumulated feedback on the PRI page http://www.unicode.org/review/pri205/ for any final discussion before the UTC
> meeting.

>
> Only feedback posted to the forum will be considered in updating those summaries.
>
> Thanks,
> Peter Edberg

I went to the forum and registered though I'm barely qualified to comment because I have not played with these solutions.
However I have some feedback and since I've not (yet?) been accepted to the forum, is it o.k. to just send it hear for now.
LDM proposal
"When the date format might be copied out of its original context and pasted into a new context.
To handle situations of this sort, it is proposed to have a character which behaves like LRM or RLM, but whose Bidi_Class value is dynamically re-assigned based on the direction associated with the current embedding level. If the embedding level is L would behave like LRM, and if the embedding level is R it would behave like RLM."
{COMMENT/JUST A QUESTION: When text is moved from one context to another, will the LDM formatting character move with it too, always? (Sorry to be so confused about this one. Obviously I have not played with the solutions much.) But this solution does sound elegant and easy. }
* * *
Phillipe has mentioned adding "dir=neutral" but I have one question:

"Issue Verdy3, supporting embeddings in higher-level protocols:
. . .
" •in HTML with the dir= attribute, which may need to add an additional value dir="neutral";"
{COMMENT: When would you use "dir=neutral" in the html tag? I can't think of use cases for the html tag; can you provide an example?; I do agree that maybe "dir=neutral" is needed elsewere -- in the p tags, and other element tags. }
* * *
"But for a very frequent case like date formatting, may be the duplicating of the "/" character for use in RTL-formatted dates in RTL locales, notably Arabic and Hebrew, would simplify a lot the encoding (at the initial price of lack of font support, or support with a fallback glyph implemented by renderers), without requiring any Bidi control. Subsidiary question, what are the separators needed for time formatting, isn't it also a frequent use case ?"
{COMMENT: Hmm, so back to Phillipe's first proposal, hyphens are used for phone numbers, dates; parentheses are used for area codes and country codes in phone numbers, spaces for phone numbers and dates, commas for dates, slashes for dates, colons for times; I think full stops can also be used sometimes; and then there are urls (slashes and full stops); not too many characters at all however this might not cover all use cases.}

Best,

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar_at_hotmail.com
                                               
Received on Sun Oct 23 2011 - 16:55:20 CDT