Linux HTML mail agent with RTL and LTR paragraph explicit support

[Shachar Shemesh]

On 06/24/2012 07:20 PM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2012 17:14:50 +0300
>> From: Shachar Shemesh <shachar at shemesh.biz>
>> Cc: linux-il <linux-il at cs.huji.ac.il>
>>
>> Thunderbird with the bidiui extension. Set the style to "paragraph", and
>> the directionality buttons work per paragraph
>> זו, לדוגמא, פסקה עברית בתוך מייל אנגלי.
> In Emacs, I don't need anything to have this paragraph display
> correctly starting at the right margin.  It determines the paragraph
> direction automatically, because the paragraph starts with a Hebrew
> letter.
>
> You should only need directionality buttons when a right-to-left
> paragraph starts with a Latin letter (something that happens rather
> rarely, but is still an important use case).

You have squashed the email to be text only. As a result, the paragraph
directionality was lost. I'm happy for you that you can still read this
paragraph correctly, but most of the rest of the world cannot read your
quoted mail quite so happily.

If you do not care about the rest of the world, that's fine, but Dov's
question specifically asked about it, so your answer is, IMHO, off topic.

There is a standard way to specify paragraph directionality in emails.
It is done through HTML. There is a standard way in HTML to specify
directionality. Unless a recent proposed change to HTML5 is accepted,
the first directional character of the paragraph is not it.

I know many people on this list don't like this standard, but this extra
email did nothing to change it (not that I, personally, think that
changing it is the right thing to do).

One of the paragraphs of this email was marked as RTL for no reason
other than a whim. Eli will not know which it was, and his reply will
not contain this bit of information.

Shachar


-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting Ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com

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