Re: Fwd: Re: Israeli HTML Standard

On Sun, 15 Jun 1997, David Rashty +972-2-6584848 wrote:

> Hi
> 
> Most Hebrew web pages in Israel are still using Visual ordering (ISO-8859-8).
> This is mainly because the browsers for the Implicit ordering are missing ;
> Visual is what work best for all.

Hi David,

As far as I understand, visual only works if everything is preformatted
(<PRE>,...) or if the browser otherwise is changed so that it keeps
the line breaks in the original. Putting plain visual text into
a file and giving it the extension .html won't work, as far as I know.
Can you please explain how exactly this is currently done?
Can you give examples of such pages, with URLs. I don't understand
Hebrew, but I would like to have a look at the source.

> I think that the HTML standard *must* include the Visual standard
> (ISO-8859-8) as one of the valid options to create HTML pages and strongly
> appose to ignore it.

Having the "charset" parameter value affect generic line parsing
mechanisms seems not very desirable. As far as I understand, even
now special markup is neccessary to have acceptable results.
Visual order can be kept by adding <BDO> (bidirectionality
override) at the right places (although that was not the original
puropose of BDO). BDO has the advantage that it won't affect old
browsers that don't do BIDI at all.

I am not so much concerned about the Israeli standard, but I am
currently working on i18n issues in Cougar (next W3C HTML version),
and I would like to have both in sync as far as possible.

Regards,	Martin.

Received on Sunday, 15 June 1997 10:53:13 UTC