On 12-Jun-04, at 5:35 AM, Hooman Mehr wrote:
- The user-friendly solution involves somewhat moving away from abstract concepts and embracing concrete objects. Lets delve deeper: What do you have on your keyboard that identifies a parenthesis? You have just a physical mark, a concrete object for each one. They do not unambiguously refer to either opening or closing parenthesis. Their meaning depends on the current *mode*. This means that Unicode results-in a modal situation without adequate feedback which I hope everybody agrees is undesirable in most circumstances.
Compared to Microsoft implementation, Apple Macintosh implements mirroring Unicode characters differently. RTL keyboard layouts of Macintosh, including Persian keyboard actually places the opposite shape of parenthesis or bracket etc. on the keyboard in order to produce the intended shape in RTL mode. This is indeed very confusing.
When Apple added Persian ISIRI 2901 to its latest OS, being ISIRI standard, it is implemented exactly as is. As a result, parenthesis on this keyboard produce the opposite of the intended shape in RTL mode.
I had discussion with an Apple developer on this subject. She insisted that this is the way Unicode wants the mirroring characters to behave and that Apple has no intention to change its implementation of them.
This whole thing means that on Mac platform we will see the wrong parenthesis on Persian web-pages forever!
I guess that along the effort in finding a proper solution for handling of mirroring characters, there has to be an effort to remove this useless mirroring effect in Unicode altogether.
I know of some Jewish foes that are not too happy about this either!
Behnam
_______________________________________________ PersianComputing mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.sharif.edu/mailman/listinfo/persiancomputing
