Re: "unicode-bidi" confusion

----- Original Message -----
From: Bert Bos <Bert.Bos@sophia.inria.fr>
To: <www-style@w3.org>
Sent: Monday, May 31, 1999 6:00 AM
Subject: Re: "unicode-bidi" confusion


> Braden N. McDaniel writes:
>  > I'm having trouble understanding the example in the spec. Can someone
>  > explain to me why
>  >
>  >     HEBREW12 HEBREW13
>  >
>  > is rendered
>  >
>  >     13WERBEH 12WERBEH
>  >
>  > given that this is in an ENGLISH PAR, and there is no markup around
these
>  > words to reverse the direction?
>
> No mark-up is needed, because the direction is intrinsic to the
> letters. I'm not an expert on this either, but let me try to explain
> how I understand it.
>
> The intention here is that the letters of "HEBREW" stand for letters
> from a right-to-left script. (We decided not to put "real"
> right-to-left letters in the spec, because they would probably not
> look right in most people's browsers.)
>
> Assume then that the word consists of letters that have a "strong
> right-to-left" directionality. The Unicode standard assigns a
> directionality to each letter; you can find it in the database of
> characters.

Aha. That was the part of the equation that was missing for me. I'd no idea.

Thanks. I'm still not sure I completely understand this example yet, but
this will certainly help a great deal.

Braden N. McDaniel
braden@endoframe.com
<URI:http://www.endoframe.com>

Received on Monday, 31 May 1999 06:12:30 UTC