Re: New article: What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup

Very nice article. Two notes:

> So how to get the punctuation in the right place? In situations such as this
you would typically have surrounded the Arabic quotation with markup - either to
denote it as a quotation, or to simply apply language information. In this case,
there is a simple remedy. Apply an attribute to the tag to change the
directional flow within to RTL.

The recommended approach is to use the RLM where it will serve to solve the
problem; that is more portable in enviroments where the markup is lost. So you
should change the order of exposition a bit. I'd suggest moving the above
discussion to down just above "nesting directional runs". At that point, add a
section that explains that there are circumstances where the use of RLM or LRM
are clumsy, and the directional attribute works better. That would then lead
nicely into "nesting directional runs", since that is where you really need it.

>Again, there are Unicode control characters you could use to achieve the same
result, but because they create states with invisible boundaries this is not
recommended.

You should mention that software that copies HTML text and converts to plain
text, however, should convert the tags into the Unicode control characters.
Caution people to try to avoid using the bdo element, since if the tag is not
property converted the display will be altered enough to destroy meaning.

Mark
__________________________________
http://www.macchiato.com
► शिष्यादिच्छेत्पराजयम् ◄


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Ishida" <ishida@w3.org>
To: <www-international@w3.org>
Sent: Thu, 2003 Dec 18 12:55
Subject: New article: What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline
markup


>
>
> A new article is available on the W3C International site: What you need
> to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup
>
> Describes some of the basic principles underlying how the Unicode
> Bidirectional Algorithm works, and some scenarios where inline markup or
> codes are needed to correctly render web content written in a
> right-to-left script. Applies to both XHTML/HTML and XML documents.
>
> Find it at: http://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/
>
>
> RI
>
>
> PS: Find a list of W3C i18n articles and notes at
> http://www.w3.org/International/articles.html
>
>
>
> ============
> Richard Ishida
> W3C
>
> contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
>
> http://www.w3.org/International/
> http://www.w3.org/International/geo/
>
> W3C Internationalization FAQs
> http://www.w3.org/International/questions.html
> RSS feed: http://www.w3.org/International/questions.rss
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 18 December 2003 17:03:17 UTC