[Fribidi-discuss] Re: Wiki on BiDi?

[Beni Cherniavsky]

Ilya Konstantinov wrote on 2003-06-08:

> On Sun, Jun 08, 2003 at 06:07:42PM +0300, Beni Cherniavsky wrote:
> > I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the world needs a Wiki on
> > BiDi.  There is no good web resource on it anywhere and a wiki seems
> > to be the simplest way to create one.  In particular I'm thinking
> > about bidi from programmer's POV, especially answering the "I don't
> > know anything about bidi, what do I have to do to support it in my
> > program?" question.  Granted, it's not frequently asked but an answer
> > would be valuable.  Besides in many scenarios the answer is still
> > unclear and a wiki seems like a good way to collaborate on it.
>
> An independant WiKi is a bad idea. What I'd rather see is a
> well-formed standard posted at FreeDesktop.org. I think Matitiau
> Allouche's Guidelines of a Logical User Interface for Editing
> Bidirectional Text [1] serve as a good start.
>
> [1] http://imagic.weizmann.ac.il/~dov/Hebrew/logicUI24.htm

I'm aware of these Guidelines.  They are a good starting point for
specifying the behaviour for simple bidi editing.  It's a worthwhile
effort but not exactly what I want to do here.  It's one of many
possibilities for handling, all unclear to the uninitiated.

> In addition, it'd be useful to write a book-style (rather than
> Reference Manual style) DocBook on BiDi, also to be published as a
> part of FreeDesktop, LDP or Ivrix.
>
Indeed, what I had in mind was some introductory material, explaining
what bidi is all about and how one can process it sensibly.  For plain
text, you just apply UAX9 (fribidi is your friend).  What about more
complex things?  How do you handle bidi in a document format that was
not designed with ready ``dir=LTR`` and ``<BDO>``?  How do you add
them to the design in least-intrusive way?  How do you implement all
this?  How do you ensure that generated content looks sensibly?

A book-style resource is the high mark I'd like to achieve but I don't
think I have enough time to pull this up alone.  That's why I want a
wiki.  Besides, many of these things are still unclear and I hope
collaborating on a wiki would be more productive than only
mailing-list based discussions.  Discussions are most effective when
you have baseline documents to which you can relate.

> If you're whilling to take a part in such effort, Ale Ve Hatzlah. On
> the other hand, creating yet another run-off-the-mill WiKi site to die
> off as an unmaintained mess in a year? No thanks.

I have some knowledge and ideas I'd be ready to simply publish on my
site.  I think I can't lose by putting it in a wiki instead, allowing
others to contribute.  If it would die in a wiki, it would die more
surely in other forms.

-- 
Beni Cherniavsky <cben at users.sf.net>