Re: Bidirectional text and URLs

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > > > It is easy to make an option turn off bidi processing.
  > > > All it has to do is make all characters seem LTR.
  > > 
  > > That doesn't disable reordering, it just makes the results
  > > indistinguishable.

  > Actually, even this is not true: the directional overrides will still
  > have their effect.  So deeper changes are needed to countermand that
  > as well.

It should not be hard for the same flag to tell the code not to
recognize those characters.

  > And I still don't understand the purpose of such a feature.  Users who
  > cannot read RTL won't be able to understand the text either way, and
  > don't know what is "the right" display to make any sense out of what
  > will be presented when bidi processing is "turned off".

One use of disabling bidi is that you'll see what the strange URL
really consists of.  And likewise any other texts that involve
bidi: you'll see what the real sequence of characters is.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
President, Free Software Foundation
51 Franklin St
Boston MA 02110
USA
www.fsf.org  www.gnu.org
Skype: No way! That's nonfree (freedom-denying) software.
  Use Ekiga or an ordinary phone call.