international layout and justification

Hi everyone,

Sorry for the cross posting.

I'm in teh process of putting together some web oages which introduce a few
aspects of HTML, XHTML and CSS internationalization that is relevant to the
creation of Syriac web pages using unicode.

Syriac, like Arabic, utilises kashida as the default form for
normalization. From memory, this was discussed in a W3C working darft on
internalional layout. Microsot has implemented this in IE 5.5 and IE 6 on
the windows platform (lathough this is dependant on the version of
uniscribe, and having Arabic and Syriac open type fonts that support
kashida, I think. Could be wrong on this point.)

While preparing the notes on Syriac web pages, i've been doing some
research. IE 5.5 uses a CSS property that Microsoft have added
'text-justify' and in IE6 they are adding 'kashida-space'. There role in
Arabic is documented in
http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/msdn/JustifyingText-CSS.htm

The behaviour in Syriac is similar. Did some testing last night. The
default justification for Arabic and Syriac in IE5.5 is Kashida.

The discussion on 'text-justify' indicates it can have the following
values: auto | inter-word | inter-ideograph | distribute |
distribute-all-lines | newspaper | kashida. Of these inter-word | newspaper
| kashida are relevant for Arabic and by extension Syriac. 

'text-justify' is detailed in
http://msdn.microsoft.com/workshop/author/dhtml/reference/properties/textJus
tify.asp 


so finally to the question, 

Which langauges (scripts) would use which values? I know some of the values
apply to CJK and south east asian languages, and maybe indic. Does anyone
have any details as to what languages use which values. I haven't managed
to locate any additional information from Mirosoft's web site yet, other
than the two references above.

Also what would be the default justification for each of these languages?

thanks,

Andj.


Andrew Cunningham
Multilingual Technical Project Officer.
Accessibility and Evaluation Unit, Vicnet,
State Library of Victoria
Australia

andrewc@vicnet.net.au

Received on Thursday, 14 June 2001 01:43:02 UTC