Re: [office] Appendix on Bidi

["David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com>]

> Michael Brauer a écrit :
> > Daniel, all,
> >
> > thank you very much for your proposal. I have taken this one and the
> > various other e-mails regarding this topic, and some additional
> > explanations I got from my colleague Frank Meies, and have created an
> > BiDi appendix document. The document is located at
> >
> > http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/download.php/18504/06-06-01-bidi-appendix
> > I think it addresses most of the BiDi related comments we received
> > from Egypt, Israel and the UK.
> >
> > I further would like to propose that we include this appendix (or a
> > revised one) into the OpenDocument 1.1 specification.

Thanks for writing this; I think it's a great solution.  International
support is a strength of OpenDocument, and having the key information
in one place makes it easier for people to find it.

I took a re-look at it (since it's going into the document) & realized that
I had a few last-minute comments.  None are serious; if they're too
late for this cycle, maybe they can be considered as "public comment" input.


First, the chapter title says Bidi & Internationalization.... it then
talks about Bidi, calendars, and numbers, but never mentions some of
the very basics of internationalization.  Perhaps there should be another
subsection, after the first two, for the basics of character set encoding
and language support.  Internationalization is a STRENGTH of OpenDocument,
not surprisingly, but since it's spread all over the document having the
highlights in this appendix would make sense:
== Character set encoding ==
OpenDocument is based on XML, and thus uses XML mechanisms
for encoding characters. In XML,
legal characters are tab, carriage return, line feed, and the legal characters of Unicode and ISO/IEC 10646.
All XML processors MUST accept the UTF-8 and UTF-16 encodings; the mechanisms for signaling which of the two is in use, or for bringing other encodings into play, are also defined in the XML specification (see [XML1.0]).

== Language ==
OpenDocument includes many features to directly support the many
languages around the world, current and historical.
These include phonetic keys, specifying the sort language
(e.g., for indexes and tables), Ruby support, and so on.
OpenDocument includes a standard metadata element "dc:language";
this allows authors to identify the language(s) used in the document.




Should we reference ISO 10646 and friends, not the Unicode specs?
This is non-normative, so perhaps this is unnecessary, but it might make ISO happy.
I'm not sure that ISO has the Bidi information the way Unicode does, though.

And several nits:
* Should "Non Normative" have a hyphen between the two words?
* "so called" should be "so-called" in all places it's used.
* In "(U+202A ... U+202E) and ," the comma after the "and" is extraneous.
* "an Unicode" should be "a Unicode" ("Unicode" begins with a /y/ sound)
* "included into an" should be "included in an"
* "only allows to store... but not" should be "only allows storing... not"

--- David A. Wheeler