RTL Behavior

[Shawn Steele]

I don't have a lot of time to spend on this, but quickly, here are some of the problems:

Currently an RTL user sees something like this:
[cid:***@01CD11B8.3665AC60]

But when the URL gets bigger, a BIDI user had the most important information displaced. So the part where they look (right side) isn't where the important stuff is.
[cid:***@01CD11B8.3665AC60]

Worse, clipping starts clipping it in the wrong direction:
[cid:***@01CD11B8.3665AC60]

Clearly those are Latin examples, however the existing behavior with an Arabic domain and ASCII path would cause the same types of problems with respect to the most important (eg: domain) part of the IRI. I would probably even argue that in this case, where the browser UI language/system locale is Arabic, and the GUI is Bidi/Mirrored, that rendering ANY IRI with the parts ordered from right to left would be much more user friendly. That's a User Preference, or at least System Preference.

-Shawn

[Martin J. Dürst]

Hello Shawn,

Many thanks for your examples. Unfortunately, they didn't make it
thought the mailing list. But they are in the archive; everybody please
check http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-iri/2012Apr/0011.html
if you didn't get the actual images.

Post by Shawn Steele
But when the URL gets bigger, a BIDI user had the most important information displaced. So the part where they look (right side) isn't where the important stuff is.

Why isn't everything outside the domain name grayed out in this example?
And the address bar could/should try to place the IRI so that the
not-grayed out part is visible initially. Otherwise, there are some
attack vectors for LTR cases, too, such as:

http://www.microsoft.com.very-long-and-convoluted-series-of--many-labels.the-bad-guys.com

Post by Shawn Steele
Clearly those are Latin examples, however the existing behavior with an Arabic domain and ASCII path would cause the same types of problems with respect to the most important (eg: domain) part of the IRI. I would probably even argue that in this case, where the browser UI language/system locale is Arabic, and the GUI is Bidi/Mirrored, that rendering ANY IRI with the parts ordered from right to left would be much more user friendly. That's a User Preference, or at least System Preference.

I agree that it might be much more user friendly.

However: The main problem with this isn't to allow it in the spec.
Changing the spec is easy (at least for Adil and Larry and me).

The *real problem* is how to get anything close to by-component
reordering according to the UI or embedding direction *implemented* in
*general text*.

Regards, Martin.