Author: gangleri

Description:
Hallo!

This request should offer a posibility to render pages properly *without*
implementing a restrictive request as made at
Bug 3819: strip phantom general punctuation characters from page titles

The function should examine the number and the correct order of general
punctuation characers RLE, LRE, RLO, LRO, PDF and the usage of LRM and RLM. You
may start reading about these characters at
http://www.dpawson.co.uk/xsl/sect2/Unicode.html.

"objects" can be whatever block of code rendered in MediaWiki. Typical examples
are page titles (regardless of the namespace), section headers, MediaWiki
messages etc.

The function should verify:
a) if the number of LRE's + the number of RLE's equals the number of PDF's
b) if they are used in a "valid" / "harmless" order
example: "PDF foo RLE" is *not* "harmless" because this can break code

a) and b) can be implemented with a counter (increased by RLE, LRE, RLO, LRO and
decreased by PDF) which triggers an exception if it's value gets negative and
another exception if the final value is not zero

exception b1) if the final value is positive and not zero an appropriate number
of PDF's would be appended
exception b2) if the value gets negative an LRE / RLE is "added" as header; the
decision depends (mainly?) on the content language

It should be investigated what would be the best to do if an object "starts!"
with LRM or RLM. This could break the rendering also. Maybe we should insert a
"Unicode Character ZERO WIDTH SPACE - U+200B" as header.

What would this fuction solve?
see the mess at

1. http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/attachment.cgi?bugid=4231&action=enter
2. http://test.leuksman.com/view/Special:Recentchangeslinked/Category:Bugzilla/BiDi
3. http://test.leuksman.com/view/Special:Recentchanges

This change may implay that some MediaWiki messages using these characters would
need to be adapted according to whatever is newly implemented so far.

This function should go hand in hand with additional embeding suggested at
Bug 4066: BiDi: general request for special pages: special pages should display
LTR / RTL according to user interface not according to content language (tracking)

The embeding required (implicitely) there relates to BiDi overlapping in a
"list" of objects. This would fix typical overlapping at
[[ar:Special:Recentchanges]] (and at all other RTL wiki's)

Best regards reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement