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

Hi Christophe

IMHO rendering is just one consideration; Comparisons, ordering etc may all
need to change based on specific language content.

I personally don't think that embedding what is effectively markup in the
data itself is really an ideal technical solution and it is up to the
applications that handle the data to manage rendering and other language
driven considerations. I therefore don't see using the language of a
term/concept to drive the display in an application as much of an overhead
:).

Please see http://aspect.vocman.com/vbe/browse?identifier=LRE-0001

for a vocabulary with terms right to left and left to right existing side by
side.

Just my 2p :)

Cheers

Rob



-----Original Message-----
From: public-esw-thes-request@w3.org [mailto:public-esw-thes-request@w3.org]
On Behalf Of Christophe Dupriez
Sent: 26 May 2011 10:39 AM
To: SKOS; Armando Stellato
Subject: 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 14:31:25 UTC