Re: Bidirectional text and URLs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Sun, 30 Nov 2014 04:37:42 -0500
> From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>
> CC: larsi@gnus.org, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
>   > > We seem to be talking about different questions.
>   > > You're talking about "some...text" but the question was specifically URLs.
> 
>   > URLs are a special case of human-readable text.
> 
> Yes, but that's not the point.  The point is that your special cases
> 
>     The places where bidi characters should work are human-readable text.
> 
> don't overlap with URLs.

My conclusion is the opposite: This issue happens _precisely_
_because_ humans review the URLs presented to them before they decide
to follow the link to those URLs.

The issue here is that bidirectional display features are being
(ab)used to trick humans into thinking they will follow a link to some
place, while in fact the link leads to a very different place.  This
problem would not have existed without humans reading the URLs, and
without the discrepancy between what those humans perceive visually
and the actual URL as seen by the program which interprets it.  A
program always reads and processes a URL in the logical order of its
characters, i.e. in the strictly increasing order of the character
positions in the string, so a program will never see any strangeness
here.