text directionality and encodings (was: Re: faq suggestions)

 >On Tue, 06 Dec 2005 22:26:03 +0900, Thorsten Schmidt
 ><ThorstenSchmidt@gmx.de> wrote:
 >
 >> Hi,
 >>
 >> i have somes questions about internationalization.
 >>
 >>
 >> Is it essential to use the dir or bdo TAG to display the correct way of
 >> the
 >> characters? Or is it needless, when UTF 8 is the Character Set?

This is independent of the character encoding, it works the same
for utf-8 as well as for iso-8859-6 and for iso-8859-8-i or
iso-8859-8-e (but not for iso-8859-8, as far as I'm aware, because
that is defined to be visual).

You usually need a dir attribute on the outer level of your Hebrew
or Arabic (i.e. on <html> or <body> if it's a whole page, on the
relevant <p> if it's just a praragraph, and so on). The rest
should mostly happen automatically, but occasionally, you will need
an &lrm; or &rlm;, sometimes an embedding (an inline element with
a dir attribute), and extremely rarely a <bdo> element. For more
details, please see the material on the W3C Web site, everything
that's available on the topic is listed at
http://www.w3.org/International/resource-index.html#bidi, and
http://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/ is
very helpful in particular.

 >> What about languages where the directions of the Characters are vertical?
 >> Should I attend somewhat or would it display correctly, too?

I'm not sure what you mean by 'attend' (if you need, you
can explain it in German).

Vertical writing is not very well supported on browsers.
It will not happen automatically, and there is no HTML
markup, but stylesheets will have to be used.

 >> Whats about when a user fill up a form ?

The user just inputs the text.

Regards,    Martin.

Received on Saturday, 10 December 2005 03:15:42 UTC