Re: [I18ndir] I-D on filesystem I18N

[Nico Williams <[e-mail]>]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2020 at 10:05:43AM -0500, Nico Williams wrote:
> On Tue, Jul 07, 2020 at 08:27:36AM -0400, John C Klensin wrote:
> > Except that "so not deal with RTL/LTR issues" is equivalent to
> > "blow off a significant number of people in the world who use
> > such writing systems".  There are probably ways deal with the
> > issues in things like file system paths, but saying "display
> > system are not in scope" and then moving on is probably not a
> > reasonable member of that set.
> 
> [...]

Hmm, unless you meant that mixing of RTL and LTR scripts should be
forbidden.  But that's not a realistic proposition given that file
extensions tend to be a) ASCII (LTR) and b) required, so even within a
single directory it may not be possible.  And even where file extensions
are not required, there is the problem of "dotfile" conventions for
hiding files.  And even if all of those were non-issues and we could ban
mixing of RTL & LTR scripts in any given _filename_, we could never keep
script mixing from happening in absolute _paths_.  So we can't
effectively avoid display issues by forbidding mixing of RTL/LTR
scripts.

Display issues for mixed RTL/LTR paths affect a very large variety of
software, from terminal emulators to browsers (because paths tend to be
used as URI/IRI local parts) to native GUI apps, and much more.  What
more can we do about them than reference Unicode?

Nico
--