Re: Localization issues: (WAS alpha v0.2)

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand <Harald@Alvestrand.no>]

At 15:00 24.01.00 -0500, Olafur Gudmundsson wrote:

> >3. localization need once more. How to handle right->left writing order
> >   such as Arabic. One consideration is treat this as an non-issue because,
> >   for example, MS Windows CP1256 which defines Arabic actually encodes
> >   the domain name in the correct byte order as per norm from left->right
> >   but the render reverse it. On the other hand, this may not apply on
> >   some other system such as Mac or Unix.
>
>
>This is a real good question: we do not want to create a system where there
>are two possible orders, the language aware and the language ignorant
>implementation come up with different names.
>The my gut feeling is force wire format to be left to right in all cases,
>but I'm willing to listen to arguments for and against this.

Since most encoding systems (including the Unicode default) use "logical 
order" as the default direction (that is, left-to-right encoded left 
character first, right-to-left encoded right character first), my gut 
feeling is exactly the opposite: Encode in logical order always.

But I think we share very much the gut feeling that there should be just 
one way of doing it.

                     Harald

--
Harald Tveit Alvestrand, EDB Maxware, Norway
Harald.Alvestrand@edb.maxware.no