emacs-devel
[Top][All Lists]
Advanced

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Bidirectional text and URLs


From: Eli Zaretskii
Subject: Re: Bidirectional text and URLs
Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 16:54:58 +0200

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 28 Nov 2014 12:27:28 +0900
> Cc: address@hidden
> 
> Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen writes:
> 
>  > Using right-to-left markers to do phishing and obscure URLs has gotten
>  > some attention on the webs today.  For instance, can you easily tell
>  > where the link below takes you if you click on it in Gnus and
>  > (presumably) rmail?
> 
> Eli's the expert

Not really, not in this particular field.

> but I would say that given that the UAX#9 bidi algorithm does what's
> wanted 99.44% of the time, it makes sense to mark text reordered by
> RTL markers with a warning face

That might be considered an annoyance by users of bidi scripts.
There's any number of perfectly valid URLs that use the same
formatting control characters.

What you suggest might be TRT when left-to-right text is enclosed
within directional override controls (which is what Lars did in his
example).  These controls assign right-to-left directionality to all
the enclosed characters, which is indeed highly suspicious in URLs.

In addition to using a special face, another possibility is to present
the directional overrides in these cases in percent-hex notation,
which will disable their effect on the enclosed text.  Of course, this
should be only done when the enclosed text is entirely made of LTR
characters and neutrals.

Like I said: we should first decide what we want to do in these cases,
and then look around for machinery to implement that.

> You do need a way to turn it off, or to make it reasonably smart, in
> the case of ASCII which is often mixed with other charsets.

Not sure what you mean here.  Care to elaborate?  "Turn off" how?  And
how do you do that without unduly punishing perfectly valid URLs that
need these controls to avoid visual "jumbles"?



reply via email to

[Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread]