Re: [minutes] Internationalization telecon 2019-02-07

Hello Richard, others,

On 2019/02/13 22:57, r12a wrote:
> hi Martin,
> 
> On 13/02/2019 10:57, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>> Hello Richard, others,
>>
>> On 2019/02/08 00:37, r12a wrote:
>>> https://www.w3.org/2019/02/07-i18n-minutes.html

>>
>>>      richard: actually vertical text with 1 character per column is
>>>      really an urban myth
>>
>> I'm not sure about this. When you see 門生羅 (and not 羅生門, as it 
>> would be
>> with LTR) at the top of a gate, the easiest way to explain why the
>> characters are placed the way they are is that whoever wanted to write
>> them was used to writing vertical lines (i.e. columns), with the columns
>> going from right to left, but only was able to fit one character per
>> 'line' (i.e. column).
>>
>> Of course, this was done rather implicitly and without calling each
>> character a column. And we cannot go back to the people who wrote the
>> name of a door on the top of a door in ancient times, but it's the best
>> explanation we have so far. If you have a better one, I'd like to hear
>> about it.

> There's a discussion related to this at 
> https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/2754 which points to or shows 
> examples of text that is multiline, but written RTL.  See also the 
> article at https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/right-to-left.html which talks 
> about Meiji era explorations related to inline character direction.

Yes. The "RTL text as one-character columns" idea is pre-Meiji. That 
doesn't make it an urban myth. The researcher that Makoto cited showed 
that there are at least 3 facts that support the "RTL text as 
one-character columns" theory for pre-Meiji Japanese:
1) Absence of any multiple-line examples whatsoever
2) Lack of cursive connections between characters even in cursive style
3) Consistent turning of characters 90° to the right for horizontal
    writing in two-dimensional character puzzles.

>>>      ... it's nonsensical
>>
>> It may be nonsensical (or not) as an approach to how to format it with
>> CSS. It may also not apply to more 'modern' Chinese examples, in
>> particular from Taiwan, where I think multiple-line RTL headings can
>> also appear.
> 
> My main concern is that i keep hearing from people who are suggesting 
> that RTL chinese and japanese should be authored in HTML by using 
> writing-modes and limiting the column height to one character.  Apart 
> from the fact that that is like trying to crack an egg with a hammer, it 
> doesn't actually work for the multiline text i mentioned above.
> 
> People may or may not think of certain items of horizontal RTL text as 
> single character columns, but i don't think that's a good way to author 
> the text.
> 
> hth clarify a little the (probably too) brief minutes.

Yes it does. I don't disagree with your longer explanations, but

 >>>      richard: actually vertical text with 1 character per column is
 >>>      really an urban myth

and

 >>>      ... it's nonsensical

is not only too brief, it's misleading. It would not have been a problem 
to say: "actually vertical text with 1 character per column cannot deal 
with multiline RTL text" or some such.

Regards,   Martin.

> ri
> .
>

Received on Thursday, 14 February 2019 06:39:23 UTC