406406 - remedy against BiDi interference caused by the (arbitrary) content of various fields

Status: NEW

(Bugzilla :: User Interface, defect)

Description

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070427 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Build Identifier: inserted manualy: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070427 Firefox/2.0.0.3

adding an attachment later
bug_bugzilla_mozilla_·_BiDi_readability_problem_·_comment_information_·_01.html

another url:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=319331#c3

Dear friends,

The BiDi algorithm does not influence / interfere at tables. The content of one cell will not interact with the content of another cell.

However in lists where <item_1> <item_2> ... <item_n> is displayed the arbitrary content in the items can interfere and visitors of the page may not recognize what content relates to what item.

There are some methods in order to « stabilize » such lists under certain conditions.

I describe here the example where no General Punctuaution Characters are present in the list items. The method explained gives good results.

The basic principle is to embed the items inside
&lrm;<span style="direction: ltr; " > and a></span>&lrm;
or similar / equivalent constructs.if the page is designed with LTR directionality
*or*
&rlm;<span style="direction: rtl; " > and a></span>&rlm;
or similar / equivalent constructs.if the page is designed with RTL directionality.


note: In the attachment the characters of the International Phonetical Alphabet (IPA) will / may not render properly. Please change the attachment with the approriate fonts inside « font-family ». Maybe you will find a solution which renders both the IPA and Hebrew character in a usefull font.

Best regards Reinhardt [[user:Gangleri]]

P.S.
Please let me know if you know better methods to achive the same result. 

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
at the url from above at anytime
this may happen in general at fields with BiDi content
Actual Results:  
not satisfactory

Expected Results:  
the fix should be easy

note:
a) The more complicated cases relating to objects containing BiDi is handeled by Bug 320273 – BiDi: request for a "BiDi balancing function" to avoid BiDi overlapping between objects
b) related topic Bug 324359 – BiDi control characters can disfigure e-mail notifications

Comment 1

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

Attachment: bug_bugzilla_mozilla_·_BiDi_readability_problem_·_comment_information_·_01.html

attachment
bug_bugzilla_mozilla_·_BiDi_readability_problem_·_comment_information_·_01.html
as promised above

Comment 2

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

Attachment: bug_bugzilla_mozilla_·_BiDi_readability_problem_·_comment_information_·_02.html

added a second attachment where the user name ends with RTL followed by a closing parentheses; the user name is now

‎lɛʁi____(לערי ריינהארט)‎

To my understanding the remedy still works. It can be broken / it might be broken if the user name contains additional General punctuation characters as

Unicode Character 'POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING' - U+202C
HTML Entity (decimal) ‬ – (hex) ‬ – UTF-8 (hex) 0xE2 0x80 0xAC (e280ac) %E2%80%AC %e2%80%ac

Best regards Reinhardt [[user:Gangleri]]

Comment 3

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

Attachment: bug_bugzilla_mozilla_·_BiDi_readability_problem_·_comment_information_·_02_LRO_and_POP.html

added an example using ‎‪foo bar‬‎ embeding

# Unicode Character 'LEFT-TO-RIGHT EMBEDDING' - U+202A
HTML Entity (decimal) ‪ – (hex) ‪ – UTF-8 (hex) 0xE2 0x80 0xAA (e280aa) %E2%80%AA %e2%80%aa
# Unicode Character 'POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING' - U+202C
HTML Entity (decimal) ‬ – (hex) ‬ – UTF-8 (hex) 0xE2 0x80 0xAC (e280ac) %E2%80%AC %e2%80%ac


It works as well. Personaly I prefer *not* to use General Punctuation characters as « immediate neighbours » of a text which could be copied and pasted by myself or other users. There is a « high risk » that General Punctuation get copied and pasted by mistake and can *harm* the target page.

This is why I try to embed such text either as

&lrm;<span style="direction: ltr; ">« foo bar »</span>&lrm;

or as

&lrm;&#8234;« foo bar »#8236;&lrm;

Best regards Reinhardt [[user:Gangleri]]

Comment 4

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Attachment: another testcase with parentheses

This is the case with parentheses that I had in mind

Comment 5

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Created an attachment (id=291611) [details]
> another testcase with parentheses
> 
> This is the case with parentheses that I had in mind

Dear Simon,

comparing your test case
http://gangleri.pastebin.com/f4ad4abd8

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=291611&action=edit

<A href="mailto:[e-mail]">l&#603;&#641;i____&#1500;&#1506;&#1512;&#1497; (&#1512;&#1497;&#1497;&#1504;&#1492;&#1488;&#1512;&#1496;)</A>

against mine
http://gangleri.pastebin.com/f7aac75fd

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=291610&action=edit

&#8234;<A href="mailto:[e-mail]">l&#603;&#641;i____(&#1500;&#1506;&#1512;&#1497; &#1512;&#1497;&#1497;&#1504;&#1492;&#1488;&#1512;&#1496;)</A>

----

This bug ( bug 406606 ) is about limiting the interfearence of the content of *one* field against the content of *other* fields by the bidirectional algorithm .

This bug is neither about the *optimal character stream* required to render "an idea" in a specific (LTR | RTL) directionality environment nor about some future attributes about an entity (in this case the user names pecified in preferences) and its suitable directionality

the last is handeled in
Bug 407067 – in a real environment providing full BiDi support each entity should have its own BiDi properties

To achive what you suggest I would use:
l&#603;&#641;i____(
I probably would add a « &lrm; » here
&#1500;&#1506;&#1512;&#1497; &#1512;&#1497;&#1497;&#1504;&#1492;&#1488;&#1512;&#1496;)

Best regards Reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]

Comment 6

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

Dear friends,

The summary is a large issue which should be a report to which many items are related.

However I opened the report because of the BiDi mess at
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=406398#c1

Please open a more specific report if necessary.


Please see also additional mess at a Bugzilla installation using a mailto icon at
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12244
b u g 12244 BiDi « .css » error at « MediaZilla »
see the attachment http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/attachment.cgi?id=4422 there

I recommend also to read
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12243
b u  g 12243 « main.css » ( and « rtl.css » ) should use the directionality « inherit? » for « non-textual entities »

Comment 7

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

Attachment: bug_landfill_bugzilla_003304_·_BiDi_readability_problem_·_03_·_LTR.html

screen dump follows
please see the difference in rendering when either
dir="foo"
or
style="direction: rtl;"
is used

Comment 8

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

Attachment: bug_landfill_bugzilla_003304_·_BiDi_readability_problem_·_03_·_LTR.jpg

screen dump for attachment 294153 [details] using
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070427 Firefox/2.0.0.3
on KDE 3.5.5

Comment 9

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

Attachment: bug_landfill_bugzilla_003304_·_BiDi_readability_problem_·_03_·_RTL.html

screen dump follows
please see the difference in rendering when either
dir="foo"
or
style="direction: rtl;"
is used

Comment 10

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

Attachment: bug_landfill_bugzilla_003304_·_BiDi_readability_problem_·_03_·_RTL.jpg

screen dump for attachment 294155 [details] using
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070427 Firefox/2.0.0.3
on KDE 3.5.5


Questions:

Is the difference in rendering when either
dir="foo"
or
style="direction: foo;"
is used another bug?

P.S. Neither did I generated the full code as can be seen at
http://yi.wikisource.org/wiki/user_talk:Jiddisch#.D7.9C.D7.A2.D7.A8.D7.99_.D7.A8.D7.99.D7.99.D7.A0.D7.94.D7.90.D7.A8.D7.98
nor did I expect the fact thet the ‎'s are now inside the spans.

In the template definition at http://yi.wikisource.org/wiki/template:style/ril?action=edit the ‎'s are outside of the span. I do not know how much css is involved at the rendering of
http://yi.wikisource.org/wiki/user_talk:Jiddisch

best regards Reinhardt [[user:Gangleri]]

Comment 11

[lɛʁi לערי ריינהארט]

Attachment: screen dump · IE Explorer 6.0.X · style problem at wikt yi project IRC · 01.jpg

note: achiving the goal is not easy because of existing bugs in various browsers

The screen dump shows what happens if the window size is changed and where directionality neutral characters are moving.

The page used there was
http://yi.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=project:IRC&oldid=11505

After making the screen dump I made
http://yi.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=project:IRC&diff=prev&oldid=11508

The new version is
http://yi.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=project:IRC&oldid=11508
where every directionality neutral character is between an leading and trailink ‎ .

This is absurd.

Best regards Reinhardt [[user:Gangleri]]