Re: OT (Kind of): Determining whether Locales are left-to-right or

From: David Tooke (dtooke@interproinc.com)
Date: Wed Dec 06 2000 - 17:06:53 EST


> You're the boss, but it still sounds like an English page with embedded
Arabic
> text to me.
Just because the application used to create the content is in english, that
doesn't make the content english. Anymore than if your Hebrew speaker wrote
a book using a English version of his word processing software.
The fact that the application has to expose certain utilitarian English
labels to the user does not make the content of the page any less Arabic.

> The Unicode folks have nicely arranged that the RTL characters are all
going
> to be in the ranges U+0590 through U+08FF and U+10800 to U+10FFF, of which
> only the first range matters just yet. This is a rather modest test, and
> probably more reliable than using the browser setting.
But again, just because there are *some* RTL characters in the output that
does not make *all* the content RTL. Plus, this would result in some
wierdness where the same user could go into the same page with two different
parameters and get it first in LTR, then in RTL, just because the database
hit a RTL character the 2nd time.

Obviously, there's no ideal way of handling this. We could just say f*&k
it...everybody see's it in LTR. But I thought trying to figure it out from
the browser might be more user friendly.

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
To: "David Tooke" <dtooke@interproinc.com>; <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 06, 2000 3:49 PM
Subject: Re: OT (Kind of): Determining whether Locales are left-to-right or

> David Tooke wrote:
>
> > The application is a database application where the majority of fields
are
> > from a Unicode database and user-entered. Their text is likely to be in
> > Arabic. Therefore, as far as I am concerned, the *content* of the page
is
> > in Arabic not English despite it being an English application. So the
page
> > should be formatted as if it an Arabic page with some English text.
>
>
> > As it is a Unicode database; I do not want to try to determine what
> > language/script *exactly* is being used. That would involve scanning
the
> > Unicode characters and a lot more jiggery-pokery than I need.
>
> The Unicode folks have nicely arranged that the RTL characters are all
going
> to be in the ranges U+0590 through U+08FF and U+10800 to U+10FFF, of which
> only the first range matters just yet. This is a rather modest test, and
> probably more reliable than using the browser setting.
>
> --
> There is / one art || John Cowan
<jcowan@reutershealth.com>
> no more / no less || http://www.reutershealth.com
> to do / all things || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
> with art- / lessness \\ -- Piet Hein



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