Bidi and Empty Parentheses

Doug Ewell doug at ewellic.org
Tue Mar 1 14:06:28 CST 2022


Andreas Prilop wrote:

> You should not use the embedding characters any longer.
> After 15 years of Bidirectional Algorithm, they finally discovered
> that the embedding characters (as well as their HTML and CSS
> equivalents) do not work as desired.

This puzzles me. Character encoding is engineering, not natural science.

If some mechanism is defined incompletely or erroneously, the definition can be corrected. If some font or rendering engine doesn't handle a mechanism correctly, it can be updated.

Very little of this falls into the category of "it worked for 15 years, or so we thought, but we've discovered a case where it doesn't work, so now we have to abandon the whole thing."

This reminds me of the discussion two weeks ago about Arabic presentation forms, in which it was explained (again) that font and/or rendering engine inadequacies were considered justification for using these non-preferred forms instead of real Arabic letters.

--
Doug Ewell, CC, ALB | Lakewood, CO, US | ewellic.org





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