Arabic or Hebrew languages (Right to Left Languages) and SKOS, XML,RDF,etc.

Hi!

I would like to know if some best practices has been set up to support 
RTL (right to left) languages in XML, RDF or SKOS.

The problem: when displaying Arabic or Hebrew, the browsers must be told 
to write from right to left and (ideally) the text is better displayed 
aligned on the right rather than the left.

One may wish that applications not be obliged to make explicit tests 
like "if language is Arabic or Hebrew then RTL+align:right else then 
LTR+align:left".

What have been done for this? What the community think that should be done?

I made a test by hand to prepare addition of Arabic to JITA:
http://www.askosi.org/JITA-ar.htm

Other languages of the JITA thesaurus, as used to access E-LIS (click on 
concepts in schemas):
http://www.askosi.org/jita

For now, my "feeling" is to add Unicode character x202B before Arabic 
and Hebrew labels and Unicode character x202C at the end (i.e. within 
the data).
Character x202C is Pop Direction Format: return to the direction (LTR or 
RTL) in use when x202B (switch to RTL) was encountered.

But what others do???

I will be happy to learn about your thought on this topic!

Christophe

Received on Thursday, 26 May 2011 09:37:47 UTC