Neutral directional characters in Mozilla/ Firefox

[romb...@hotmail.com]

Mozilla or Firefox for Linux display the following HTML extract (with
the capital letters indicating Arabic text):

<div dir="rtl">
The date is:<br>
2006 YLUJ 17
</div>

... like this:

The date is:
2006 YLUJ 17

Yet, I understand from the litterature on bidirectional Unicode text
that neutral directional characters (like the colon) surrounded by
strong directional characters of different directions (in this case:
the "s" and the "A") receive the same direction as the paragraph (in
this case: right-to-left). So I would have expected the colon to appear
at the other end of the line, like so:

:The date is
2006 YLUJ 17

Moz/FF behave as expected if the second line starts with some
right-to-left text. For example:

<div dir="rtl">
The date is:<br>
2006 YLUJ 17 YADNOM
</div>

is displayed:
:The date is
2006 YLUJ 17 YADNOM

Do Moz/FF wrongly consider the digit at the beginning of the second
line as a strong character, giving the colon the same (left-to-right)
direction? Or am I missing something else?

Thanks

Patrick

[Simon Montagu]

See http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/#W7

In the first example the first strong character before the digit is
left-to-right, so the digit is considered left-to-right.

>
> Thanks
>
> Patrick
>

[romb...@hotmail.com]

Thank you for your reply.
I understand my mistake (well, I think!): I didn't consider that fact
that, when the neutral directional characters are resolved, the weak
directional characters have already been resolved (i.e. have received a
direction).
So in the example...

<div dir="rtl">The date is:<br>2006 YLUJ 17</div>
...

1) "1" is given a left-to-right direction according to the W7 rule you
pointed out to me;
2) the colon is seen between two strong directional characters ("s" and
"1") and receives the same direction as these.

Patrick

Simon Montagu schreef: