Re: Directionality Standard

Yes indeed. My mistake. I'm not much into the technical side of this  
issue. I'm a simple user.
But clearly, a simple right click and assigning rtl directionality  
for typing a paragraph (or any action of that nature) is no guarantee  
for that paragraph to go anywhere with its directionality intact. And  
this is what I put forward for Unicode to address.
Let me tell you what triggered this thread.
We have a Persian site with news and discussion forum. It provides  
RSS feed. But RSS readers were displaying the content in ltr format  
and totally unusable. The person who is more technical and takes care  
of this site finally found this
http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2007/05/17/reading-feeds-in- 
right-to-left-order.aspx
and implemented language tag 'fa' to our site and our problem with  
RSS reader in IE7 was resolved. But the problem in Safari of Mac  
remains. I suppose if Safari implements the recognition of those  
tags, the problem would be resolved with Safari also because  
otherwise it is a perfectly Unicode compliant application. But I am  
puzzled why a directionality issue should be resolved by a language  
tag in the first place, and if this is not a Unicode issue, how much  
longer and how many times, are we supposed to address these problems  
and solve them, using made-up solutions, one device at a time?
To me, this is a Unicode issue because I type an rtl paragraph and I  
expect it to remain rtl, anywhere it goes.

Behnam

On 18-Dec-07, at 3:50 AM, Richard Ishida wrote:

>> From: [email protected]
>> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Behnam
>> Sent: 18 December 2007 02:34
> ...
>> And why do we need language tag in HTML or other formats if
>> this property is defined within the encoded paragraph?
>
> As Jony said, you need direction attributes, not language tags. Wrt  
> why those are needed in HTML:
>
> [1] 'paragraphs' are defined by markup in HTML, since whitespace  
> (including newlines etc) in the source is normalized for display
>
> [2] attribute values in HTML affect more than a 'paragraph' at a  
> time - a single dir="rtl" at the top of a document may be all you  
> need for the whole document, and this will affect things like  
> ordering of table columns as well as stuff internal to paragraphs.
>
> [3] the bidi algorithm is often insufficient to resolve potential  
> ambiguities in embedded mixed direction text, and markup can be  
> used to set the needed directional context for the  embedded text  
> (see http://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/ )
>
> hth
> RI
> ============
> Richard Ishida
> Internationalization Lead
> W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
>
> http://www.w3.org/International/
> http://rishida.net/blog/
> http://rishida.net/
>
>
>
>
>