RE: Bidi controls vs markup revamp

Hi David,

You'll see upper case used in places like the HTML spec, where the examples are usually of bidi text, but the text remains completely in English. For example,

This is English but CIBARA SI SIHT.

The upper-casing is used as a way of identifying the reversed text more easily.

The current approach uses a transliteration of the Hebrew, rather than a reversed translation, so the convention is not really needed, and the lowercase more closely follows existing hebrew transcription methods.

HOWEVER

We could change the approach.

We could instead use the following as the ASCII representation for the problematic version:

the title says "YTIVITCA NOITAZILANOITANRETNI, w3c" in hebrew.

(note the removal of all upper-casing for the English, otherwise it would suggest that the 'W3C' bit is in Hebrew)

and for the corrected version

the title says "w3c ,YTIVITCA NOITAZILANOITANRETNI" in hebrew.

I must admit, I can see some attraction in this way of doing things.  It's more clear what the directionality is for the English-speaking reader.  So i propose to change to this format.
 
Cheers,
RI

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/blog/
http://rishida.net/




 


________________________________

 From: David Clarke [mailto:w3@dragonthoughts.co.uk] 
 Sent: 23 November 2007 10:02
 To: Richard Ishida
 Cc: public-i18n-core@w3.org
 Subject: Re: Bidi controls vs markup revamp
 
 
 Note : Bidi is not my field of expertise.
 
 I believe it is common practice to represent non-ASCII text using upper-case letters when showing an example in in ASCII, particularly for directionality examples.
 
 In light of this, would it be a good idea to change 'mvanjbh tvlj*p' in the examples to 'MVANJBH TVLJ*P' ?
 
 Richard Ishida wrote: 

  Chaps,
  
  I was editing the ITS WG's Best Practices for XML Internationalization this afternoon and I needed to refer to an explanation of why you should use markup rather than unicode control characters.  The obvious article was http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-controls.en but (a) that was very focused on HTML, and (b) I have felt for some time that it needed some beefing up, particularly in the explanation dept.
  
  So I set about creating a new version, currently visible at http://www.w3.org/International/questions/temp.php
  
  I'd like to publish this new version asap.  Please tell me whether you have any issues with it before Wednesday's telecon.
  
  Thanks,
  RI

Received on Monday, 26 November 2007 12:00:35 UTC