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

Christophe,

I personally do not think SKOS or any other structured format should concern
itself with display and presentation, especially adding control chars within
the data itself [1].   Display and presentation of data should be left to
the browser application itself, and the markup handling.

1. http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-bidi/

On Thu, May 26, 2011 at 4:38 AM, Christophe Dupriez <
christophe.dupriez@destin.be> wrote:

> 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
>
>


-- 
-Thad
http://www.freebase.com/view/en/thad_guidry