Re: Bidirectional text and URLs

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:

 >  . modify the way the relevant directional controls are displayed to
 >    make them prominently apparent

-0 I don't think this will help enough, especially for the users who
would most benefit from Emacs's automated paranoia (ie, those who read
bidi but not RFCs).

 >  . allow the user to request a temporary display of the URL in its
 >    original logical order, before the reordering, or maybe do that
 >    automatically in a tooltip

+1 for the tooltip, with url-encoding for format characters, which are
non-conforming to RFC 3987 anyway.

Note that RFC 3987 specifies that bidirectional IRIs must *always* be
displayed with the UBA, and as if in an LRE embedding.  I'm not sure
how you would enforce it, but I believe this would defang larsi's
example (ie, at the start of the URI proper in logical order insert a
LRE, and at the end a PDF -- any directional format characters between
those points are nonconforming to RFC 3987, section 4.1, last
paragraph).

 >  . replace the relevant directional controls with percent-hex encoded
 >    representation, which will as result disable the reordering

-1  If they're outside of the IRI, this will just make things ugly.
If they're inside the IRI, they're non-conforming and therefore bogus,
and would be caught by the tooltip.

 >  . cover the relevant directional controls with a display property
 >    (e.g., with a display string " "), which will also disable
 >    reordering

-0 This is just a specific implementation of the first option above, right?