When typing in Hebrew and trying to enter a punctuation mark such as .,!; it is treated as if I switched to English (it is put to the right of hebrew text).

In some circumstances (e.g. in a left-to-right textarea like the one I'm writing in now) the behaviour you describe is correct. If you see it when typing in a right-to-left textarea, or when typing in a right-to-left element in Composer, then it's a bug. Please specify where you were typing and an example of the exact text that you entered and how it appeared on the screen. Thanks

It indeed doesn't happen in RTL input field. What should one do if he wants to enter Hebrew text with punctuation marks inside LTR field (as part of message)? What about writing mail message?

I don't know any practical way to override the direction of a text field. In theory you can use the Bidi control characters LRM and RLM (Unicode 200E and 200F) but that is too awkward a solution to be helpful when just typing a message.

As for mail, there is an Israeli standard which specifies that the direction should be determined by the first character in the message with a strong directionality, i.e. if there is an English alphabetical character before any Hebrew character then the message is considered left-to-right; and if there is a Hebrew character before any English character it is considered right-to-left.

As for mail, there is an Israeli standard which specifies that the direction should be determined by the first character in the message with a strong directionality, i.e. if there is an English alphabetical character before any Hebrew character then the message is considered left-to-right; and if there is a Hebrew character before any English character it is considered right-to-left. This standard is not currently implemented in Mozilla, but I would like to add it in the future.

> As for mail, there is an Israeli standard which specifies Simon, please write in the URL to the specific standard you're talking about.

The standard is SI 1904, but I don't know of any URL for it. There's a one-line abstract at http://www.sii.org.il/standard.nsf/Standards/1019040000?OpenDocument where you can also order copies. (It is of course in Hebrew) cc-ing Jony Rosenne.

SI 1904 refers to The Unicode Standard, which specifies thsi behavious in the absence of a higher level protocol specifying the base directionality of the paragraph. It is on page 3-12 of TUS 3.0, as far as I can remember.