Re: [Ietf-languages] Fwd: I-D Action: draft-msporny-d-langtag-ext-00.txt

[Richard Wordingham <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, 27 May 2019 14:56:02 -0600
"Doug Ewell" <[e-mail]> wrote:

> > What I was explaining was that "what rendering process is likely to
> > display Arabic left-to-right?" is not the right issue. You don't
> > need to know the paragraph embedding level to display pure Arabic.
> > If you are curious about the BIDI algorithm, you can consult the
> > spec, or better yet, the W3C page on it.  
> 
> OK, so the issue is that (in layman's terms) they need to declare the
> paragraph to be of a certain directionality, even if the text that
> begins the paragraph (or some other text that would set the tone for
> directionality) might not be of that directionality. Is that right?
> If so, I contend that a plain old language tag should still be a
> sufficient indicator of that:
> 
> <span
> lang="ar">rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
> IS A LONG WORD.</span> (example is HTML, substitute your favorite
> text format that uses language tags)

So how do you use a present-day language tag to set the paragraph
direction for Middle Egyptian in hieroglyphs?  Do you have to do
something like ensuring that the scope of the Middle Egyptian language
tag doesn't extend to the starts of paragraphs?  (Reminder: Ancient
Egyptian Egyptian hieroglyphs could be laid out in either order;
right-to-left was the default, but nowadays the default is left to
right, apparently even in Arabic publications!

And what if you want to have English text in right-to-left paragraphs?  

Richard.