Okay, how would you do it? If you want bidirectional mixed language support, you're not going to get around implementing bidi rendering at some layer. Character

Okay, how would you do it? If you want bidirectional mixed language support, you're not going to get around implementing bidi rendering at some layer. Character encoding is not that layer. You are making legitimate complaints, but they are largely in the realm of poor internationalization support. There may be finger-pointing between applications, toolkits, and OS middleware, but the character encoding should not be taking the bum rap for that. Internationalization is a fundamentally difficult engineering problem and no character encoding is going to solve it.