Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML…

… is the subject of the W3C working draft for future improvements to bidi support in HTML5 and CSS3. Having formally moaned three years ago about the state of bidi in HTML, it looks like something will actually change. A few months ago a group was formed to formalise a proposal to the W3C about [...]

Musing on Unicode Data

A while back Apple asked me to improve the Arabic system font in Mac OS X (which is now available in OS X 10.6). The requirements were daunting to say the least. The font had to support the full Unicode Arabic range, presentation forms and all. This meant adding some 1500 glyphs to my font [...]

A Tale of Two Tweets
or how Twitter broke the bidi algorithm.

For years I have been trying to explain to anyone who would listen that the Unicode Bidi Algorithm has a fundamental flaw. The problem was that I did not have strong practical examples… and then along came Twitter.
My complaint is that Unicode bidi considers most characters that are not letters or numbers as neutrals and, [...]

Mashing Up Bidi - Unicode Conference Slides

At the 33rd Unicode Conference I gave a presentation around the problems I encountered in my previous post Mashing Up Bidi. Here are the summary and slides:

Mashing-up Bi-Di
Mash-ups is a relatively new fashionable word on the Web - taking bits of other web sites to build up your own web page. It is not new [...]