UAX #9: applicability of higher-level protocols to bidi plaintext

[Eli Zaretskii via Unicode]

> Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2018 10:38:18 +0300
> Cc: Asmus Freytag <asmusf at ix.netcom.com>
> From: Shai Berger via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org>
> 
> And again -- the point is interoperability. If I cannot trust that
> people I communicate with make the same choices I make, plain text
> cannot be used.

This conclusion is too extreme.  In Real Life™, every reasonable
application that supports bidirectional text will have a knob that
allows the user to force a particular paragraph direction on a region
of text.  So if you display some text you received from outside the
application, and the display looks juggled, let alone illegible, you
force the other paragraph direction, and the problem will usually be
solved.  At least IME, and I do have experience not only with Emacs.