[Fribidi-discuss] Record Separator in BiDi

[Nadav Har'El]

On Mon, Aug 12, 2002, Ilya Konstantinov wrote about "[Fribidi-discuss] Record Separator in BiDi":
>...
> According to the Unicode code charts, RS is 0x1E and US is 0x1F -- both
> displayed as "Missing-Character" squares in Mozilla (I guess it simply
> passes them to DrawString, instead of assuming them as zero-width
> control characters).
>...

These are, by the way, the ASCII RS and US characters - it's not a unicode
invention. However, RS obviously had nothing to do with bidi in the original
standard, so in my opinion it is somewhat strange to attach such new meanings
to them now.

ASCII had RS (Record Separator), FS (File Separator), US (Unit separator),
nd GS (Group Separator). I have never seen any application that actually
attaches any sort of meaning to any of these control-characters when they
are in a text file.

But I guess it wouldn't hurt attaching meaning to these characters, after
they have been just laying there, unused, in ASCII, for the last 35 years :)

> All in all, those are very important and convenient characters to
> prohibit unwanted BiDi behavior (e.g. on webpages, when two unrelated
> fields get mixed together because of BiDi processing).

Doesn't a newer unicode solution exist? Checking
http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr9/, indeed I don't see any.
So maybe you have a point that such characters are indeed needed.

-- 
Nadav Har'El                        |        Tuesday, Aug 13 2002, 6 Elul 5762
nyh at math.technion.ac.il             |-----------------------------------------
Phone: +972-53-245868, ICQ 13349191 |Experience is what causes a person to
http://nadav.harel.org.il           |make new mistakes instead of old ones.