On Thu, 2017-06-29 at 11:26 -0400, Josh T wrote: > While I am not a programmer that has needed to deal with > internationalization, it is to my understanding from friends in the field > that most implementations get it wrong, and thus how any one program > renders it should not be taken as evidence one way or another. For example, > I don't know for certain if the text viewers of each right honourable > Agoran supports the correct CJK flags that forces the font to render the > correct Unihan variant. While I am not familiar with Arabic encoding (I > don't speak Arabic, although if I tried really hard maybe I can use my > knowledge of Akkadian to decipher text?), it is my understanding that > Unicode encodes text by order of input and not "logically" as a concession > for backwards compatibility, and thus feel that stating that the text > should be interpreted as English because it is left-aligned is like having > a chef that doesn't know how to prepare lobster but tries his best anyway, > but eir customers conclude that lobster isn't good because of > unintentionally ill-suited decisions the chef made.
Right, that's why I had to look into the actual byte stream of the message. The encoding listed in the email (which is not a Unicode encoding) is normally logical, but can be physical (it's somewhat underspecified). However, if it's interpreted as physical, the Arabic is written backwards (and thus meaningless). As such, the only sensible conclusion is that the text is actually written in logical order, which would imply that the English comes first. (It could also have been written with the Arabic first to produce the same visual appearance, but it wasn't.) -- ais523
